


Extraordinary Measures

by interstitial



Category: Supernatural
Genre: A Multitude of Other Consent Issues, Angst with a Happy Ending, Don't Try This At Home, Dubious Consent due to Alcohol, Hallucifer, Implied/Referenced Canon Self-Destructive Behavior, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con (Past Lucifer/Sam), M/M, Off-screen Canon Temporary Character Death (Castiel), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Rough Sex, Sam Winchester's Demonic Powers, Sam and Dean Have Terrible Coping Skills, Witch Sam Winchester
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-29
Updated: 2018-10-29
Packaged: 2019-08-06 01:02:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 11
Words: 29,469
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16378412
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/interstitial/pseuds/interstitial
Summary: In the wake of their deal with Billie to escape the supermax in12x09: First Blood, something suspiciously Lucifer-like is gunning for Sam's body, and even more so for Dean's head. To save Dean, Sam is forced to confront the return of his unwanted powers, the shared legacy of his and Dean's past actions, and his conflicted feelings of anger and desire for the brother he's always loved.Canon-divergent at 12x09.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ameliacareful](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ameliacareful/gifts).



> Thanks to my awesome beta, [TFWBT](https://teamfreewillbettertogether.tumblr.com/), whose suggestions made this fic much better than it otherwise would have been. Go check out his smoking hot fic [here](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TFWBT/pseuds/TFWBT). And all my love and thanks to my amazing artist, [threshie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Threshie/pseuds/Threshie/works?fandom_id=27), who both writes and does stunning art in a variety of mediums and styles. I feel incredibly privileged to have had the opportunity to work with her, and you should all go see both her [masterpost](http://threshasketch.tumblr.com/post/179454281283) for this fic and her gorgeous [art blog](http://threshasketch.tumblr.com/) on tumblr.
> 
> [Ameliacareful](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ameliacareful/pseuds/ameliacareful) said two years ago she wanted to see Sam lose his temper. I've been working on making that happen in a way that felt authentic and personally meaningful to me ever since. I'm quite sure this wasn't what you had in mind, ameliacareful, but I hope you enjoy it anyway.
> 
>  **Warnings:** Fic is rife with consent issues of various types. Neither Sam nor Dean is always a cinnamon roll in it. On a 1-10 scale, with tooth-rotting fluff at the 1 end, canon in the middle, and serial killer AUs at 10, this is probably around a 6 or 7.

Prologue

-*-*-

After the long silent ride in the dark, after the shackles, and the cavity search and the prison jumpsuit, after they shove Sam in a concrete box and lock him in alone- after all that, when Sam is exhausted and strung out on adrenaline and anxiety, finally the torturer comes in.

He doesn't call himself that, of course; he calls himself a cop. But if there's one thing Sam knows, it's the look of someone whose job it is to cause him pain. He's got that sharp jaw, that little hint of avarice behind the flatness in his eyes. His voice is too pleasant for the things he's saying.

"Spend enough time staring at these walls, just you and all that nothing," he says. "You'll beg for the chance to tell me what I need."

The joke's on him though, because Sam's interrogation warranty ran out a couple hundred years ago, give or take. It's not that he won't talk. He'd be begging right now if he thought it would do any good. It's just that, in the end, he won't be worth the trouble.

He's not looking forward to the final act. He'll do what he can to last. He'll do push ups and crunches, and write treatises on monster hunting in his head. He'll practice his Latin, and he'll worry about Dean, and he'll stare out his tiny slit of a window at the slice he can see of the sky. He'll sleep and have nightmares, and he'll eat the crappy institutional food they shove through a slot in his door, even though he'll hate it. When the interrogator finally gets around to coming back, Sam'll lie and not be believed. When he's desperate enough, he'll tell the truth and be believed even less.

He'll pray. A lot.

And then at some point, inevitably, Sam's confinement won't be solitary anymore.

This place will wreck him, and still get nothing usable in return.

 

One

-*-*-

Their first meal back at the bunker after they escape from the supermax is a disaster. Sam and Dean have been up for thirty-five hours straight, and even Cas looks frayed at the edges, his hair messier than usual, and his mouth set in a harassed, sarcastic frown. Mary's gone, disappeared to some mysterious meeting apparently so urgent a meal with her family was too much time to waste. It's uncharitable to resent it—she doesn't owe them anything—so Sam tries not to dwell on it.

"A little less stabbing next time would be nice," Dean complains. He and Cas are bickering about the rendezvous with Billie.

"Of course, Dean, next time I'll stand idly by while you shoot yourself in the head. Whatever you prefer."

Sam pushes his food around on his plate. He's not particularly interested in Cas and Dean's argument. He feels numb.

"Planning on eating that sometime today?" Dean asks through a mouthful of chicken. '' 'Cause the mother ship ain't coming, Sam." He points his drumstick at the haphazard pile of food in the middle of Sam's plate. He's not wrong. The mashed potatoes do look a little like Devil's Tower.

"Sam is an adult," Cas snipes. "He can eat without your assistance." Cas is of course not eating either, but somehow he manages to sip his coffee in a disapproving fashion.

Sam makes a hole in the side of his mashed potato volcano and watches the gravy ooze out. His stomach gnaws at him, but under his insulating blanket of not-feeling he's stressed enough that if he eats, it'll only get worse. He has to fight to keep his hand from drifting up to his cheekbone, where his face always feels too sharp when he starts to lose weight.

At the prison, Lucifer would perch on Sam's cot, leaving nowhere for Sam to sit with his mystery meat and reconstituted juice drink but on the floor. He'd smile his smarmy, false sympathy smile, and remind Sam the guards could always tube feed him if he refused to eat.

"I hardly think I'm the reckless one in this equation," Cas continues peevishly. "My plan involved all of us alive at the end. Did yours?"

"You know what, Cas? There were circumstances." Dean's gaze cuts over to Sam. His expression is opaque and closed off, and it makes something squirm in Sam's chest, something ugly and anxious that Sam doesn't want to acknowledge.

The feet of Sam's chair screech as he pushes away from the table. He gathers his dishes to bring back to the kitchen. Dean interrupts his war with Cas long enough to give Sam an assessing once over and purse his lips, but he doesn't say anything more.

"I'm fine," Sam says. "Just tired."

He heads down the hall to his room, his boots echoing in the empty hallway. He makes it as far as his door.

It wont be like his cell was.

His desk will be there, with the books from the Men of Letters library he's been cross-referencing. The light will come in through the grate above his door in a different pattern than it did through his tiny window in the supermax. His bed will be comfortable, and not too short.

He stands there with his hand on the knob, and he's nauseous, and he decides maybe he'll do some target practice first. Or catalog artifacts.

He walks without much attention, unable to keep his mind from wandering to exactly the thing he's trying to ignore. That look from Dean. Not the 'Sam's too thin and won't eat' look; that one Sam gets. The other look, the flat one he uses when he's done something Sam won't like, and is shoring up his ability to not give a damn. What was that about?

Of course, Sam's not thrilled with how the whole escape went either. He only agreed to it because Dean with a plan is like a pit bull with a bone made of stupid. Take it away too fast and you'll end up with its teeth in your hand. He has no doubt at all that Dean had a backup plan, and that whatever it was, he would've liked it even less than the one Dean actually floated.

So that explains Sam's role in the whole fiasco.

But what explains Dean's?

Sam's feet take him to the storeroom that fronts the dungeon, and his subconscious should really get bent, because he just escaped from a dungeon and is none to eager to pretend he's back. Still, he's here, and there's magical junk to catalog, and it’s something to do.

The door creaks as he opens it onto shadowed rows of shelving piled high with the occult detritus of his and Dean's forebears. He's reaching for the light switch when the hairs on the back of his neck start to prickle. It's dim inside, yes, hard to make out much beyond the vague looming shapes of the shelves and a rough impression of what's on them—books on some, boxes and jars and covered pots on others. But the bunker is just a hole in the ground lined with concrete. It should be even darker than it is; dark as a grave.

Sam enters with Ruby's knife in his hand. He ignores the light switch, inches forward as quietly as possible in the minimal cover of the shadows between the shelves. The two racks that hide the dungeon door are pulled back, and the door is cracked open. A pale glow spills out from behind it.

As Sam approaches, it swings wide, no hand on it, and he's left exposed on the threshold.

Billie is lounging in the chair Sam and Dean tie their prisoners to. The old metal table they keep their interrogation aids on is in front of her, and she’s thumbing through a comic book.

"Billie," Sam says. He swallows hard. Sam saw her spark like lightning and flicker out. The hilt of Cas' angel blade was flush against her back. She has to be dead.

"Sam! Long time, buddy. How was super secret spy jail?" A mocking smile lights up Billie's face, all teeth and all wrong. And ah crap—Sam should've known he wouldn't catch a lucky break on this one.

"Lucifer."

"That's my Sammy; so much more than just a pretty face."

"You're in the Cage," Sam says. Reminds himself.

"Am I?" Lucifer gestures casually behind Sam, and the door to the hall slams shut. Sam flinches.

In his cell in the supermax, Sam's imaginary Lucifer never messed with the surroundings. Sam had thought he couldn't. He'd been so relieved.

Lucifer pushes back from the table, and smooths Billie's hands down the front of her tank. She’s still wearing the same outfit she had on when Cas stabbed her. If there's blood, or char marks, or a hole in the shirt and jacket, none of it shows from the front.

"Like my new meatsuit?" Lucifer asks. "Found it in an ICU in Loveland, paralyzed from the waist down. Knife wound to the spine. The original owner's still in here," Lucifer taps Billie's forehead. "She was easy to convince."

_Jesus_ , Sam thinks, _please don't be true_.

He manages to drag his attention far enough off Lucifer to remember Ruby's knife in his hand. He slices it hard across his other palm. Lucifer doesn't even flicker.

"It only works if I'm not real, Sam."

Blood drips off Sam's cut palm and his other hand starts to sweat. Ruby's useless knife is slippery in his grip. He wants to back away; to turn tail and run, but he's frozen where he is, heart pounding erratically, a rabbit in the shadow of a hawk.

Lucifer unfolds himself from the chair. He steps across the painted devil's trap and strolls over to Sam. His gait is nothing like Billie's practical self-assurance.  
"How's the family, Sam?" he asks.

The room smells vaguely of smoke.

"Remember, back in the Cage, how I'd get so irritated when you'd call for them? Dean especially, _'Dean, Dean, help me, save me'_ ," Lucifer’s voice climbs into a cruel sing-song. "Like a broken record. Honestly, I figured you had Stockholm Syndrome or something. Too many monsters, and no one but Dean to show you affection."

Lucifer steps into Sam's space. Holds Billie’s hand out. He's so close Sam can smell Billie’s hair product, see Billie’s eyelashes each individually. Lucifer scowls impatiently, and Sam can barely keep from taking the unspoken order and handing the knife over without protest. It's been years since Hell, but Lucifer’s lessons are hard to unlearn.

Sam draws in a deliberate breath, counts it back out as slow as he can. He tightens his fist around the knife's grip.

Lucifer takes Sam's hand in Billie's. “Ah, Sammy,” he says, and pats Sam’s fist. “Never change, man. I love you just the way you are.”

He uncurls Sam's fingers by force, and takes the knife anyway, Sam's resistance meaningless. Like it always is.

"How 'bout that Kelly Kline woman, huh? Who'dve thunk it. Me, with a kid."

He glides around behind Sam, while Sam tells himself to move and can't. Billie's body presses up along the length of Sam's back, Billie's breasts crush soft below Sam's shoulder blades. Billie's rich voice whispers against Sam's neck, and Sam’s skin crawls with goosebumps.

"Anyhow, I get it now, Sam." There's a pause. "Well, okay, maybe not all of it, what with the incestuous urges and all. That's a bit twisted.

"But family—I get that they need you. A child needs stability. No more vessel-hopping for me; I’m ready to do my part and settle down."

"No," Sam says.

Lucifer tangles Billie's hand in Sam's hair, pulls his head back so his throat is exposed.

"I wasn't asking."

Billie’s other arm snakes around Sam's body like an embrace. A bright prick of pain blooms on Sam’s neck, right beside his jugular. It burns a line down the tendon there, bumps over his collar bone. It's small, but unmistakably physical; no different or less real than the cut on his hand.

Sam's eyes water from Lucifer’s grip in his hair. The front of his tee pulls away from his chest. There's the sound of tearing fabric, and Ruby's knife reappears in his limited sight line.

Lucifer brings the tip in so close to Sam's eyes they close reflexively. He slices down Sam's cheek along the line of the bone, pauses at the corner of his mouth, like he's deciding whether to cut Sam's tongue out or not.  
"Dean would make you kiss it," he says, offhand. "And you’d love it too. Not so much my thing though."

It’s beyond Sam how Lucifer can fit so many layers of lie into such a short statement. It’s pointless to argue though, and defending Dean is always a particularly bad mistake. He says nothing. His scalp aches, and the knife wounds—minor as they are—burn nonetheless. His chest itches where blood runs down it from the cut above his collarbone. He thinks he should move, fight back, try to escape, but he's paralyzed by the knowledge that he’ll only lose in the end.

"I tried with you, Sam, you know I did," Lucifer says. "But here’s the thing. You’re kinda dumb, and I’m in a hurry."

Lucifer snakes Billie's hand into the pocket of Sam's jeans.

Sam's breath freezes in his lungs. He'd stop his heart if it would keep him stiller; a hopeless, futile prey instinct, as if Lucifer won't notice him unless he moves, won't notice where he's got Billie's hand.

But Lucifer only extracts Sam's cell phone.

"Priorities," he says, Billie's voice rich and low. "But maybe later, if you're good."

He walks around Sam to face him, pats him on his bleeding cheek, and grabs him by the neck. The pressure on Sam's airway breaks him out of his immobility, and he starts to struggle, tries to pry Billie's fingers off his throat.

"Do I want a ‘yes’ from you, Sammy?" Lucifer goes on calmly, not even breaking a sweat while Sam thrashes at the end of Billie's outstretched arm. "Of course I do. No one likes to be turned down. But I want your meatsuit more, and you just don't learn."

The edges of Sam's vision sparkle and blur. Blue and yellow flames crackle impossibly in the dungeon's concrete corners. Lucifer drops his hold and Sam crumples to the floor, gasping.

Lucifer kicks him in the belly a couple times, casually, not even trying to hurt him much. Sam retches and curls himself around the pain, coughs on the smoke and the swelling that's already starting in his throat.

“So here’s how it’s gonna be," Lucifer says. "You're gonna scream, and then I'll call Dean, and when he gets here, he and I are gonna make a deal. Little Cassie's healing's not what it once was. You're gonna need someone with a bit more juice on your side."

Behind Sam a row of shelves crashes to the floor. Pieces of a broken clay pot ricochet past Sam, and something cold and wet splashes against the back of his arm. Fire climbs the dungeon walls and smoke roils black as demons along the ceiling.

_Cas!_ Sam calls in his head, _Cas, I-_

"Oh no you don't." Lucifer makes a fist and pain lances though Sam's temples, slamming down into his brain all at once, like it used to at the start of his visions. He's shaking now and can't stop, and his tongue tastes like metal and burning popcorn. He'll be seizing soon if he makes it that long without oxygen.

"Sam, you still with me? You're not holding up your end here, buddy. I need you to scream, so Dean'll know it's urgent."

He kicks Sam again, harder this time, but it only makes Sam moan; the pain in his head is too distracting to register much else. His eyes are squeezed shut, tears running down his cheeks, and the air is crackling and roaring around him, and it's hot; really, really fucking hot.

"Doesn't matter," Sam forces out through his clenched teeth. "It has to be me. I have to say yes."

Lucifer bends down, and whispers right in Sam's ear, "I heard about Gadreel, Sam."

"No," Sam says, as the first flames touch his skin, sharp and horrible and so very familiar. "He wouldn't. Not you."

Sam is burning, skin charring off, flesh frying on his bones. He does as he's told and screams. Not because he's been told to, but because there's nothing else to do. The whole world is pain, and screaming is just what happens.

“Oh I think he will, Sam," says the devil. "Let's find out."


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter includes content that may be triggering for readers sensitive to sexual assault/rape. Content includes depiction of a character not included in the story tags. Readers who would like to skip the scene, can contact me on [my tumblr](https://chiisana-sukima.tumblr.com/) for a summary.

Sam and Dean are making love.

They're in Dean's bedroom. Dean's bedside lamp is turned down low, throwing twisting shadows on the walls and ceiling as Sam and Dean move together in tandem. Dean's guns and his homemade blade from his year in Purgatory hang on the wall beside them. Sam's hands sink into Dean's memory foam. His cock slides past Dean's, slick between their sweating bodies, grinding hard along the groove beside Dean's hip.

Dean holds onto Sam's ass, thrusts up against Sam's pelvis. Sam has wanted this, wanted Dean, for so long.

"Sam, oh god," Dean moans.

_Dean_ , Sam starts in reply.

Only that's not what he says.

His lips move, and his lungs breathe out, and words fall out of Sam's mouth.

But, "I am not Sam," is what they say.

Dean goes still.

"I have no wish to kill you, Dean Winchester," Sam's mouth says. "But you must understand, you've grown dangerous to me."

"Gadreel."

Sam's head nods.

_No,_ Sam thinks, inside himself, where no one who cares can hear him, _no no no, oh god no._

"I am truly sorry, Dean," Sam's mouth says without him. "But at least we can give Sam this before you die."

_No!_ Sam screams at himself.

Under Sam's body, Dean is motionless as a corpse already, not fighting, waiting between Sam's hands, assessing.

"Why pretend, when you have so little time? Do you not wish Sam to have this memory for when you're gone?"

Dean hesitates, but inexplicably, he nods.

_What're you doing, Dean!? Jesus fuck, he's gonna kill you!_ Sam yells. His body ignores him.

Dean can't hear, because Sam can't speak, but surely he knows Sam would want him to fight.

But Dean ignores Sam too. He squirms underneath Sam, opens his legs wider, reaches between them and takes hold of Sam's cock. The feel of Dean's hand, the closeness and the easy competence of his fingers around Sam's shaft, the years of watching him with guns and suturing supplies and with shovels and the wheel of the Impala, and now with Sam—they make Sam shudder and he jumps in Dean's hand, and god, god, it feels so good, so perfect, and it's the worst thing that's ever happened to Sam, the worst by far. He's hard and flushed hot and leaking, thrusting into Dean's hand, and he can't even cry.

Together, Dean and Gadreel maneuver him until Sam's cock is slippery with sweat and precome, and the head bumps up against Dean's hole. In one slow thrust, Gadreel sinks Sam home. Dean grunts, but it's only in concentration. His pupils in the dim light are blown black, and his face is serene. The air smells of ozone, and on the wall above Dean's headboard, the shadow of Gadreel's wings spread out like a frame. Dean is tight and warm around Sam's cock, and Sam's teeth are biting at Dean's neck, and even if Sam isn't really the one who's doing the licking and the kissing, Dean's skin still tastes like heaven. Dean's body, firm and lean against Sam's own, and soft and giving around him, feels like it was made to hold him.

Gadreel rocks them in a gentle rhythm, builds the pleasure slow and easy. Dean goes with it, the two of them moving together. Dean kisses Sam's cheekbone, his open lips. He strokes Sam's hair, and he's smiling, how can he be smiling? He rolls his hips, pushes up into Gadreel's thrusts, drives them faster. He's tight and hot around Sam's cock, and he contracts his muscles as they move, working Sam from the inside, until Sam is lost in it, thoughts breaking into pieces and sliding away, nothing left but the waves of his body's pleasure. He comes like a downpour, overwhelming and all at once, and then there's nothing left at all—a tiny moment of stillness, of grace.

It's quiet, just their breathing, and it's dark, because Gadreel has closed Sam's eyes. When they open again, Dean is still hard, but he's composed, at rest.

"Thank you, Dean," Sam's mouth says.

Dean nods, accepting and satisfied.

Sam's hand reaches out for Dean's forehead.

Static crackles down Sam's arm, gathers in his fingertips.

Sam begs and screams, but he can't move, can't control anything or stop anything or even protest.

He touches Dean's forehead, and—

 

-*-*-

Sam wakes screaming. When his eyes fly open, he's already sitting bolt upright, hyperventilating. His heart is thundering in his ears. He doesn't recognize the room he's in, or have any idea how he got there.

"Easy, Sammy. You're okay."

Dean's there too, alive.

Dean has one knee on the bed Sam is in, and he's holding Sam's shoulders, like he was trying to wake him, or maybe comfort him while he slept. Dean's fully dressed, plaid over-shirt and boots and all. He has dark circles under his eyes.

Sam is dressed too, in sleep pants and a tee. There are blankets twisted around him like whitewater. He didn't kill Dean.

"Yeah," he says. "Yeah, I'm okay, I'm fine. Just a nightmare." The room sloshes around uncomfortably. Sam lies back down.

"Told you not to watch _Jingles the Clown_ before bedtime," Dean says. He pats Sam on the chest, backs off and plops himself down on an ugly green arm chair that's wedged up next to the bed in an extra-close way that reeks of vigil. On the chair's other side is a second bed. Hotel then.

"How're you feeling?"

Sam looks around. The room is cheap motel standard; not even themed. It lists lazily a couple more times before stabilizing into stubborn anonymity.

Sam's arms and legs feel heavy. His muscles are achy and sore, and there's a dull knot in the middle of his chest. His dick is still half hard despite his dream-self nearly killing Dean; it's information about himself he wishes he didn't have.

"What happened?" he asks.

But then he remembers.

The dungeon, burning.

Lucifer.

"Was hoping you'd tell me," Dean says. "Cas healed you. Before that though, no idea. Security cam in the dungeon's a hunk of slag."

Dean watches Sam expectantly. His expression is so neutral and earnest he looks like he’s interviewing a witness. It makes Sam’s skin crawl. He doesn't know how to react.

He doesn't ask what hotel they're in. He doesn't broach how they got here, or what day it is, or what his body's been doing while he wasn't controlling it. He's not sure he wants to know.

"Cas healed me," he says flatly. It's supposed to be a question, a neutral request for confirmation or denial, but he can't keep the skepticism out of his voice. There are no telltale signs of an intruder inside himself, but he didn't feel Gadreel either.

"Yeah, basically," Dean says. "He's not exactly done yet. He said to take it easy while his mojo recharges."

"Cas healed me, sort of. That's what you're going with."

"What I'm 'going with'?" Dean's eyebrows draw up in a confused little furrow. " 'The fuck is that supposed to mean?"

Sam thinks he should probably be angry. The truth is though, he doesn't really do anger much anymore; hasn't since the Cage. And it's especially hard to manage any when the adrenaline from his dream hasn't even burned itself off yet, and Sam is so distractingly relieved to have not killed his brother. The confused crease between Dean's eyebrows makes him look twelve years younger, like he did before Hell and Purgatory and the Mark, and Sam wants to smooth it out with his fingers, erase everything and make it all have never happened. The futility of the wish bangs against his rib cage and his chest hurts worse.

"Was I not supposed to notice?" he asks. His voice cracks a little at the end. "Was I supposed to have forgotten more. Is that it? This was all supposed to seem normal, but something went wrong?"

Dean's eyes narrow suspiciously. "Okay, wait just a minute here, Sam-"

"No, I don't think I will this time," Sam swings his feet over the side of the bed.

Dean scoots forward to the edge of his chair, vigilant in case Sam takes a header. The room rocks gently like the sea.

"Sam, calm down, man. Whatever you think is going on, it's not."

Dean's eyes keep drifting to Sam's hand.

Sam looks down at it. He's grinding his thumb into the flesh of his palm. It aches dully, but the skin is intact, like all his skin appears to be. It's not enough pain to be useful.

Sam shoulders his way past Dean's reaching arms, and stalks across the room to the door. He yanks it open, and it slams behind him, and then he's outside in the dark, in an empty motel parking lot. Sodium lights slide off the Impala's perfect wax job. There are no other cars. There's no moon. There's a dusting of snow on the ground and Sam is barefoot.

He starts walking.

Dean's boots pound across the tarmac behind him.

"For fuck's sake, could you just hold on?" Dean grabs Sam's arm, but Sam shakes it off.

Sam picks up his pace. Dean gets ahold of Sam's shoulder, starts to spin him, and Sam goes with it, throws a punch as he turns. Dean dodges. Sam's knuckles glance off the edge of Dean's jaw.

"Ow, what the hell, Sam?!"

It's enough to make Dean lose his grip, and Sam pulls free, walks faster this time, almost running, bare feet burning across the freezing pavement, cold night air harsh in his lungs.

"Sam, wait!" comes from somewhere off behind him and it sounds kind of panicked, but fuck Dean, how much does he expect Sam to put up with and still act rational every minute of the goddamn day? He just needs a little time, for Dean to back off and let him think for two seconds, needs-

Pain hits sharp and bright at the back of Sam's head. The orange lit, parking lot sky goes black, and Sam's knees buckle.

Dean's voice comes from above him, irritated and sad, "Christ, Sammy, why can't you do anything the easy way?"

 

-*-*-

Sam regains consciousness more slowly the second time around. He has a vague sense of being jostled and of voices. His bed is too soft, like the web of an arachne. Time floats by in fits and starts, and Dean and Cas are arguing again.

"Because last time this happened, he tried to shoot me, okay? The second he stops thinking I'm Satan, the cuffs come off; scout's honor."

Sam keeps his eyes closed. That was Dean speaking, off to Sam's left somewhere. Sam is lying on his side. His hands are numb and wrenched behind him. He tries to pull an arm forward, and isn't surprised when he can't. A TV drones in the background, something about the life cycle of otters.

"Yes, I'm positive. You think I like playing _Let's Make a Deal: Reaper Edition_? Those douchebags at the supermax had video, Cas. Sam was falling apart."

The otter narrator explains maternal behavior and care of the pups. Behind his eyelids, Sam considers the variety of video the interrogators could have shown Dean. Sam tried, going slowly insane in his prison cell, not to talk to his imaginary Lucifer out loud. He knew there were cameras and that his deterioration would be used against his brother. But imaginary version or not, Lucifer has always been persistent.

"And you didn't think Sam's hallucinations warranted discussion _before_ he tried to knock you out and wander off?" Cas asks. His voice comes from the area of the television, and it competes with the narration, so it reaches Sam's ears all garbled together: "warranted discussion before _—active hunters, chasing prey in the water_ —wander off _"._

"Discussion with who exactly? Sam? Sure, Cas, no problem. Talking to Sam about his mental health's not at all like pulling teeth with a fucking fork."

Cas makes an annoyed tch’ing sound. Sam's upper arms and shoulders burn from the position of his hands behind his back. He's on his side, with his left arm under him, and his pinkie and ring finger tingle persistently. A nerve must be impinged. He'll have to change position soon or risk damaging it. (Cas will fix it if he injures himself, but does Sam really want more angels playing with his body?)

"And it's not like I could talk to your unconscious ass about it either, Cas. Little busy dragging both your butts out of the unsecured, enemy-infested bunker."

"I wasn't unconscious," Cas replies a little huffily. "Merely weakened. But your point is—"

"Or Sam could've brought it up, seeing as how it's his crazy-cookies, not mine."

"—well taken," Cas finishes. "Also, Sam is awake."

"Awesome," Dean mutters under his breath. Sam opens his eyes just in time to see him smooth his grimace into a patented Dean false smile and point it at Sam like a laser.

They seem to be in the same room as before, or another exactly like it. Same ugly furniture, same motel standard carpet, same utterly forgettable wall art.

The side of Dean's jaw is swollen and purple where Sam hit him. The circles under Dean's eyes are almost as dark as the bruise now, and his bed appears unslept in. He's wearing the same clothes he had on the last time Sam was conscious.

" 'Morning, Sleeping Beauty. Feeling any better?"

'Wandering off', as Cas puts it, was in retrospect not a great idea. Even if Dean would let him, and if Lucifer found it amusing and gave him enough rein, where would Sam go with the Morningstar hiding inside him like a dirty bomb in the back of a truck? Much as he doesn't like it, Sam legitimately might need to be contained. (Not that the handcuffs will do that. Not that anything will if Lucifer doesn't want it to.)

"Yeah," Sam says. He turns his head and the room stays reassuringly steady. "I do feel better."

It's sort of true.

"Sorry about, uh, before," he adds, and sticks out his chin to show what he means.

Dean rubs his jaw and accepts the apology with a shrug.

"It wasn't your fault," Cas says. He's in the ugly green chair, which is now back by the TV where it no doubt came from. Otters slide adorably down a muddy bank and into a river on the screen behind him. "Last time you woke, you were short half a liter of blood, and your electrolytes were dangerously imbalanced. I imagine it was disorienting."

Sam needs time to think.

It's been—well, he doesn't know, probably at least a day, and possibly much longer; so of course Dean has a story prepared.

But would Cas lie too? Maybe, if he thought it was for Sam's own good. But Cas isn't attached to Sam alive at all costs like Dean is. Maybe they're telling the truth, as they both understand it.

And Dean's right about Sam's recent grip on reality.

Sam pulls on his handcuffs a little. "Yeah, it was," he says. "Confusing. I do feel better though."

He flops himself over partway onto his stomach so his cuffed hands are more apparent, harder for his brother to ignore.

"We're in a hotel. I don't know which one. You're Dean. Cas is over there." He motions with his head towards Cas. "That's it. I don't see anyone else. Can you let me up now?"

Dean's eyes narrow. "Where's Lucifer?" he asks.

Sam needs time, and he needs information. He's a case, and he doesn't know enough to solve himself.

"Lucifer's in the Cage," he says.

He has no idea whether he's lying or not.


	3. Chapter 3

The motel turns out to be in Concordia, only an hour away from Lebanon.

"Closest place I could stop," Dean says, "and still assume whatever's in the bunker wouldn't find us before you and Cas woke your lazy asses up for the day."

Dean returns his arsenal to his weapons bag and they pile into the Impala, all of them conscious and at least semi-functional this time around. Dean peels out of the parking lot. Sam’s phone says 8:12 am, February 5th. He's only lost thirty-nine hours total, and considering his physical condition, it's plausible he slept though them.

Dean finds them a retro, fifties-style diner called Miss Concordia, for breakfast and attack-planning. The waitress who shows them to their table is wearing a poodle skirt and the table has one of those mini-jukebox things on it. Sam spins the dial to see the pages of song choices in faded pink print flip back and forth. Chuck Berry, the Big Bopper; same choices across the whole United States. Maybe one company manufactures them all.

Dean orders pancakes and bacon for himself and an egg white omelet with every vegetable known to man for Sam. Sam’s pretty sure they didn’t make omelets that way in the fifties. He would’ve picked something lighter—it’s egg whites, sure, but there’s no way to fit all those vegetables gracefully between the de-yolked remains of three eggs without a truckload of grease to fry them in. Dean picked it because it's Sam’s favorite though, so Sam lets it go and eats as much as he can force past his lack of appetite.

Their strategy session is hampered by his reluctance to admit anything concrete about the attack. He claims his memory is clouded, and Dean's mouth flattens out disapprovingly, but they run through the short list of monsters that mindwipe and attack with fire. Sam makes a second, silent list; substituting ‘affect perception of reality’ for ‘mindwipe’. He keeps coming back to angels, and he’s not sure why. It’s not like angels attack with fire either, at least not usually. (Lucifer liked fire in Hell though. Lucifer has always liked fire.)

Dean watches Sam from over the rim of his third coffee refill. "Look, we already know about the Satan thing, okay? So just tell us. You thought you saw him down there, didn't you?"

Fuck.

Sam tries to keep it vague.

He thought he saw Lucifer (true). He doesn't know what it really was (also true, assuming it wasn't Lucifer). He says it taunted him, tried to burn him alive (true and obvious). He doesn't mention what it wanted, or that it looked like Billie.

They settle on cursed object as the most likely source of the problem; the whole thing went down in a storeroom, and the Men of Letters treated their hazardous artifacts with the same careful attention to safety as a toddler with a new box of toys. But they plan for the more dangerous possibility of an enemy that hasn’t vacated yet too. Dean takes it seriously, plans out a campaign to retake the bunker room by room. They leave the dungeon for last.

"Not that it seemed too impressed by the dungeon last time, whatever it was, but we got no place better to store it," he says.

Cas suggests re-warding the rooms as they go, so they discuss that for a while too. Fast or thorough? Enochian or Latin or combination? Synergistic with the wards the bunker already has or something entirely new? Broadly aimed but vague or targeted at specific threats?

Sam’s breakfast isn’t agreeing with him. The proportion of tomatoes to other vegetables is too high and the whole thing is kind of watery and unpleasant. Or maybe that’s just Sam. The bunker's been breached (Sam has). He’s queasy and cold and he can't place why.

 

-*-*-

They're in the war room when Dean decides it’s time for lunch, and Sam gets a chance to talk to Cas alone. The three of them have cleared the garage level, and are working through the big rooms on the main floor. Sam and Cas are finger-painting sigils on the wall with salt dissolved in holy water and blood. They’ve settled on broadly aimed sigils: 'reveal and repulse evil', and 'protect the area enclosed'.  
Sam puts his bowl of diluted blood on the map table. He stretches the aches out of his back.

"If I was possessed, would you know?" he asks. He hopes his tone ends up closer to 'professionally covering every option' than to 'I think my brother screwed me over again and I’m having a panic attack'.

Cas scowls at the bank of flashing red lights and mysterious gauges blocking part of the wall opposite the one Sam’s working on. Sam and Dean have lived in the bunker four years now and they’re still not sure what all of them do.

"Of course, Sam,” Cas says. “Demons' true selves are visible to me through their host." A twitch of his finger slides the control mechanism forward, and he squeezes in behind it. “I doubt it was a demon anyway. Most demons don’t burn their victims. Ironic, all things considered.”

"What about ghost possession? Effects of a cursed object?"

Cas’ fingers drip crimson onto the sleeve of his white dress shirt as he starts in on his next sigil.

"Ghost possession, I’d be able to tell, yes. Other ill effects of a magical object, unlikely, as there’s no entity involved to reveal."

"An angel?"

"Yes."

"Even if it was more powerful than you?"

"Yes.” Cas turns back to Sam, regards him with that same uncomfortable intensity Cas has always had, but now usually hides better. “Why are you asking this, Sam?"

"Just being thorough,” Sam lies.

They paint for a while in silence.

The next time he speaks, Cas’ face is hidden by his raised arm, hand reaching high up the wall to paint the top strokes of the ‘enclose’ sigil. His voice is soft though, careful.

"An archangel, it's possible I wouldn't know. If he was trying to hide."

Sam's stomach hurts.

Dean comes back with sandwiches and beer, and Sam wipes his bloody fingers off. He eats a few bites, and puts the rest aside. Dean does a poor job pretending not to care.

They finish the war room, and move down the hall to the bedrooms. There are no supernatural entities in any of them. Nothing is missing or out of place. It's a waste of time, and they're all getting tired and cranky, and just want to be done.

The shower room is clear.

The gun range yields nothing.

“Was hoping for here,” Dean says. “Gettin' kinda bored and this'd be an awesome backdrop for shooting something in the face.”

They finally get to the dungeon, and it freezes Sam in his tracks.

The shelves in the storeroom portion are all knocked over, and everything they held is burned or ruined or crushed on the floor. There are chunks of broken pottery surrounded by tacky, dried up fluids, and piles of ash shaped vaguely like books. The concrete walls are black with soot, and there are scorch marks on the ceiling.

The dungeon itself is even worse; the metal chair and table partially melted, the cabinet where they store the interrogation aides broken open, the doors burned off, and everything inside it smashed or shattered. The devil's trap is broken by char marks. Streaks of black radiate out across the floor in a sunburst pattern, starting like a bullseye from the spot Sam was standing in. He can't imagine how he survived.

"Holy fuck," Dean breathes, like he's seeing it for the first time too. Considering the level of danger Sam must've been in last time Dean was down here, maybe he more or less is.

"Well, whatever it was, it's gone now," Dean says. There's nothing left standing to hide behind.

"Not necessarily," Cas replies, and adrenaline spikes through San's veins and sets his heart pounding. Turns out Cas only means any remnants of magical artifacts could still be a hazard though, and not, as Sam's hindbrain insists, that whatever attacked Sam could now be hiding inside him.

Dean turns a slow circle. "We should at least do a preliminary sweep, make sure nothing’s gonna turn into Apocalypse 15 by morning."

“How?” Sam asks. “Maybe we shouldn’t randomly touch all the deadly magic refuse.”

_Should have thought of that last time I was down here_ , Sam adds bitterly to himself. But it sits wrong inside, and he’s not sure he believes it.

They settle for cleaning up the stuff they can identify definitively as harmless, warding the room from outside in the hall, and coming back later with more research and some hex boxes in hand. It’s not a great solution, but hunting is a lifelong series of questionable solutions strung together like pearls. Why should this one be any different?

 

-*-*-

Sam brings a stack of research back to his room and reads. His eyes are gritty with exhaustion, even though he apparently slept all the way through last night at the hotel. (Maybe. As far as he knows.) His mind keeps traveling the same loop over and over. Lucifer, Sam burning, Sam screaming, his phone in Lucifer's hand. Sam unconscious, Dean, the hotel bed, Cas.

If Dean and Cas are lying, they're doing it convincingly. But also if they're lying, Lucifer can erase mistakes, rewrite the story however he wants. ‘Stone one’, tiny little pebble that it was, has long since been kicked over the edge of a cliff and carried away by the raging river at its bottom. It's best not to think on that part too hard.

He turns a page in _Classification of Magical Artifacts by Properties and Use_. He won't remember a word of it come morning, but that's fine. He's reading it mostly as a distraction while he waits for Dean to fall asleep and Cas to... do whatever angels do to recharge. Contemplate the glory of the cosmos, or watch _Game of Thrones._

Dean was barely on his feet by the time they gave up sorting through ashes and trash for the night, and Cas hasn't recovered from healing Sam yet, so Sam figures the hour that's passed should be plenty of time. He stretches and pockets his phone. The bunker is quiet. Dean's light is off. The flickering blue of a TV leaks out from under Cas' door.

Sam digs a jug of holy oil and some chalk out of one of the storerooms fortunate enough not to have had Sam plus a curse (or Lucifer) destroy it. Outside their paranoid occultist hole in the ground, it’s a beautiful starry night, if a little cold. Sam's dressed for it this time, in comfortable layers of flannel and a jacket and his steel toed boots, and it's kind of nice actually. Bracing.

By the light of his phone, he chalks an anti-angel sigil on the wall next to the garage door. When he connects the first line to the last, a buzzing starts up in his head like a wasp is trapped inside his skull. It’s irritating, and maybe he should leave. The stars are beautiful, sure, but why is he out here alone in the dark? He should go—

Where?

Somewhere else.

He's getting a headache.

There's a stick of white chalk in his hand, and he could toss it in the grass and go elsewhere, except—

He's holding it because-

Why would he be outside in the cold at half-past who-even-knows with a stick of chalk. There’s obviously a reason, and chalk is for spells, so— There’s—

Ah, he remembers. The urge to leave retreats into the background; still bothersome, but ignorable. He steps across the threshold into the garage. The air feels thick as he moves across the boundary between the outside of the bunker and its interior, but it's not impossible, hardly even all that difficult really. He steps back out and smudges a break in the sigil's lines, and the buzzing disappears.

He tries not to think about implications. He walks a ways, until he reaches an open field out back behind the bunker, where he pours a circle of holy oil in the remains of last year's grass.

He steps into the circle. He checks his phone for charge—although who will he call if he ends up trapped? More things not to think about—he drops a match.

Flames spring up around him, blue and pure in the winter cold. He walks up to the curving line of fire, and takes a deep breath. He holds his hand out above the flame, grits his teeth, and lets the fire lick at his palm.  
It hurts of course; enough so Sam can't stop himself from jerking back. But he thinks it’s normal, human pain. He thinks there's nothing inside him being burned alive. (He isn't sure, shouldn't he be sure?)

Fire leaps and plays in front of him, innocent-looking and terrifying. He steels himself, and takes the step.

It's like swimming against a riptide, like when he was a child and would hold his hand out the window of the Impala as his father sped them down the highway, and Dean would say it'll get cut off, but then he'd do it too. It's just one step, and he pushes through, and then he's on the other side. He's still himself, he's still alive.

Okay then.

It was hard to cross, so there's something wrong with him.

But when is there not something wrong with Sam?

Whatever it is, it concerns angels. Residual grace, maybe? That would mean he’s hosted another angel he doesn’t remember, even if it’s gone now. It makes his skin crawl. But is it objectively worse than normal for the general course of his life? Probably not.

He cleans up the evidence of his experiments and goes inside to get some sleep. He'll figure the rest out later.

He's okay. He's not possessed.


	4. Chapter 4

They take some cases. They save some people, and kill some things. Cas goes off to look for Kelly.

Sam's dreams don't get any better.

In the worst dreams, Sam and Dean escape the supermax, chased down by howling dogs through the cold Colorado woods. Billie appears, and Dean pulls out his 1911 and puts a bullet in his brain. He doesn't even say goodbye, too intent on taking up his role as sacrificial lamb before Sam can snatch it away. Blood soaks into the ground and stains the knees of Sam's jeans as he cradles his brother's empty body in his arms. _He did it for you,_ Cas says, and Sam wants to die too.

In the best dreams, Sam and Dean fuck in broad daylight, on their king-sized bed, in their joint bedroom, in their perfectly average above ground home. The sun shines in through their window. Dean smiles up at him, and his hands on Sam’s body are tender. Sam always wakes from those dreams hard and ashamed.

Awake though, Sam's doing alright. He gains back most of the weight he lost in confinement. His face doesn't feel all sharp and wrong anymore, and Dean's overbearing solicitude dissolves back into his usual annoying but solid demeanor. Sam researches his newly acquired weakness to anti-angel magic, but he finds nothing relevant, so eventually he drops it. Lucifer makes no appearances, and Dean concludes whatever curse Sam activated must have burned itself out. Sam's not convinced, but he counts his lucky stars and keeps his mouth shut. The cases, for the most part, go well.

There are exceptions though, and they start to get worrying.

The first one is a qareen. Dean finds it on a message board a couple of the hunters at Asa Fox' funeral put together, sort of an electronic Roadhouse, _but without the beer or pool_ , Dean says, _leave it to humans, we can ruin friggin' anything._

"So get this," Dean jokes, and Sam obediently rolls his eyes.

There's the shapeshifting, the typical string of gruesome murders that start with a kiss, the revelation of the victims' dark desires. There's even video of an ineffective silver bullet shot to the head, ruling out an ordinary shapeshifter. The qareen brushed it off; the hunter who fired it died screaming.

Sam wants nothing to do with the case. But explaining his reluctance is out of the question, so when Dean won't be rationalized or distracted away, they end up taking it anyhow.

Maybe he's getting old, or maybe his luck has just run out, but whatever the reason, the qareen gets the drop on Sam. It's a petite young woman in business casual when it takes him; its handgun incongruously huge in its manicured hands. But by the time it’s forced Sam through an overgrown trash heap of a yard and into the rotting house it’s using for a lair, the qareen has transformed into Dean.

"Jeez, you hunters chaff my ass," it says with Dean's voice. It waves him up a creaking set of stairs and into a hoarder's paradise of a bedroom filled with old magazines and plastic dolls with missing parts and VHS tapes and a million other used-up, cheap consumer goods.

It ties Sam to its bed and straddles him, forces his lips open, and gives him its curse with its teeth and spit and tongue. When it pulls back away, it smells like Dean's sweat when he's sparring. It grinds against Sam's cock, and watches him with Dean's guileless green eyes. Sam's dick hardens uncomfortably in his jeans.

The qareen kisses him again, crushes Dean's plush lips against his own. Sam opens his mouth for it, let's it poison him more.

"Mmm," it murmurs, "your own brother. That _is_ delicious." Its voice is whiskey-rough; not just Dean, but Dean when he's a little drunk, when he's hustling pool, bent over his cue with his ass on deliberate display, when he's flirting with a girl, hoping for a quicky out back or a night in her bed.

It nips at Sam's neck, unbuckles his belt. Sam grinds up against its thighs as best he can, restrained as he is by the ropes and its weight on top of him. He struggles to free his arms so he can hold it.

"Dean," he whines, and Dean smiles at him, wide and dazzling. Sam is drowning. He knows and doesn't care.

"I can hardly wait to kill you," Dean purrs. He cups Sam's face between his hands, and Sam leans desperately into his touch.

But Dean's hands go slack and he tips sideways and slides off Sam's hips, and lands in a graceless pile on the mattress, one leg still lying across Sam's thighs, an _it_ again. Nothing but a dead, ugly monster. The real Dean has found its heart and stabbed it, and Sam knows he should be relieved, but he's not, he's really not.

He tries to collect himself while he waits for Dean to arrive and free him, but his dick is still hard and he keeps finding himself wishing the qareen had held him just a tiny bit longer before it died. When Dean shows, and cuts Sam out of his ropes, and helps him to his feet, Sam is still shaking, more disturbed than he has any right to be.

Dean pats him down for injuries. His hands are in Sam's hair, his fingers gentle against Sam's scalp as he feels for hidden lumps or fractures, and suddenly they're intolerable. Sam's ears buzz from the residual poison-curse, and he's encased in an awful sense of unreality, as if the qareen's spell was the actual world, and the Dean who's never put his lips on Sam, who Sam will always have to hide from, is the nightmare.

"I'm fine, Dean, get off," he snaps, and jerks away from Dean's grasp like he's twelve.

"Whoa; sure thing there, Rapunzel," Dean's hands go up in the universal sign for 'don't fuck with the crazy person'. "Think we should burn this thing or bury it? It's too ugly to leave for the cops."

The outside of the qareen's home is the same insanely junk-filled fire hazard as the inside. Burying is definitely the safer option.

Dean strips off his flannel to take the first round of digging. Sam keeps an eye out for neighbors, and tries not to watch the planes of Dean's chest through his tee, the bunch and release of his muscles as he works.  
"So what'd it look like, Sam? I told you mine; you tell me yours."

Dean’s hardly counts. He was under Amara’s compulsion when the qareen took him. It didn’t reveal anything real. Sam doesn't dignify him with a response.

"Hmmm, let's see," Dean muses. His shovel bites into the dirt with practiced ease. "Bet it was.... Arthur Ketch. You wanna bone him with that golden egg thing we used to send Lucifer back to the cage."

Sam sits down on an ancient CRT with a broken screen. He still feels a little- not dizzy exactly, but also not right in some ill-defined way he can't put his finger on.

"Very funny, Dean, projection much?"

Dean grins. Rich black soil piles up beside the outlines of the grave he sketched with his shovel.

"Who's that tiny little shriveled-up Supreme Court judge again?"

"Ruth Bader Ginsburg," Sam says dryly. "And could you please not?"

"What, Sam? She's exactly your type. Bet she's a demon under those robes." There's a pause- almost short enough not to be awkward, and then Dean goes blithely on. "Not a demon demon. I meant I bet she fucks like crazy. Bet she'd quote the constitution while she rode your dick."

"Jesus, Dean, she's eighty-five. Can't you dig without talking?"

"Well, technically,” Dean says, “I'm seventy-eight, and you're, what, like two hundred and thirty-four? You’d be robbing the cradle.”

They trade places, and Sam takes his turn with the shovel. It’s March but the year’s been warm, and the soil is soft.

When the grave is deep enough, Sam climbs out and they thread through the maze of junk, and back inside to collect the corpse. Dean keeps up his annoying monologue. He watches Sam warily from the corner of his eye, like if he shuts up for two seconds Sam might turn to smoke and blow away.

“It was Ruby, wasn't it. Musta been. Who else could it be? She was hot, for a demon, but god did I hate that bitch."

"It wasn't Ruby."

“Do you even have any dark desires? When’s the last time you got laid? Not that I’m sayin’ go bang a demon again, ‘cause don't. But you’re kinda a monk these days, it’s a little sad.”

Dean’s not wrong. The whole thing's sad. Dulled down by the passing of time, but still a bitter ache in Sam's chest if he dwells on it too much. He cared about Ruby, maybe even loved her by the end.

And it's hurtful and intrusive and inappropriate and kind of suffocating too, and there's no way for Sam to fight back. He can’t exactly say _It was you, asshole_. He recognizes it's the kind of thing that would once have made him crazy with anger. But when he looks inside himself, there's nothing there. A little irritation maybe, but that's about it.

The sweat from his grave digging is drying on Sam’s skin, and he shivers as they lift the body between them. It's a hideous thing, even for a corpse, skin rotting off its bones, tissue leaking putrid fluid like it’s been dead for months instead of an hour.

They walk it out the bedroom door and down the stairs together, Sam’s hands under the qareen’s rotting knees, and Dean taking the heavier part of the carry, his grip under its arms, its head lolled against his chest. Sam is freezing cold now, despite the exertion, and he can't wait to get the thing in the ground, so he can blast the Impala's heat til he gets some feeling back in his fingers.

“Aw, Sam, c’mon man. You look like someone kicked your puppy,” Dean says. “I was only kidding, dude. You were so good with me about the Amara thing, and you seemed freaked out. It’s just a monster. Whoever you saw, if you wanted to tap it, you would’ve by now. It doesn’t mean anything.”

There's a creak and a long, low groan above them. A corner of the living room ceiling cracks like ice.

Sam barely has time to drop the qareen’s body and shield his head before the plaster buckles. The ceiling collapses in a hail of off-pink insulation and rotting two-by-fours. Broken boards and rusty nails ricochet like artillery off the floor. Everything sails past Sam, but a jagged piece of board hits Dean end-on, square in the chest, and a nail embeds itself in the muscle of his upper arm.

Dean's relationship with principles of field medicine is a hot and cold affair. He dusts himself off and pulls the nail out of his bicep, grimacing but casual.

“It’s a nail, Sam; it’s not gonna kill me,” he says, and he doesn't bleed out through the puncture wound on the way back to the hotel, so Sam guesses he's right this time.

He helps Dean pull his blood-soaked T-shirt over his head to reveal the ugly splinter-filled gash underneath, right smack over Dean's heart, still oozing and already surrounded by livid black and blue. It makes Sam queasier than it should. It's not that bad on the Winchester injury scale.

Still, it’s deep enough and filled with enough debris that flushing it and tweezing out the splinters and suturing the whole thing closed is a lengthy process. Dean jokes and drinks his way through it. He's pale and sweating, and it’s obvious he's in pain, but even so, it's calming in a way. He leans into Sam’s touch unselfconsciously. Turns toward the bite of Sam’s needle. Sam pinches the edges of the wound together to stitch, and Dean’s heart beats under his hand. Alive, alive, alive. All this time, all this struggle and pain, and they’re both still alive.

"Thanks, dude. We'll make a doctor out of you yet," Dean says when Sam's done, and slaps him companionably on the shoulder, then winces when it jars his injuries.

The offhand praise jangles in Sam's head, rubs the wrong way against his nerves. Deep in his belly he feels something crawling; eerie and wrong. Dean should not be thanking him.

 

-*-*-

There's another case. Seven children inexplicably dead in the forest, no injuries, all wearing white cotton clothing and found with flowers in their hair. Dean thinks it's fae-related, and he's manic with the brittle enthusiasm he gets when the solution to a horrible mountain of grief is to pile more death on top of it.

"I'm telling you, Sammy, time to fight the fairies. Been waiting to off those sparkly bastards for years."

They argue over strategy while Dean drives them toward the epicenter of the cases. They're kids; Sam gets that's why Dean is all gung ho to run right in, iron rounds blazing. But the story's wrong for fae, and even if it is the Fair Folk, how is Sam or Dean getting whisked off to fairyland gonna help anyone?

"Well, how is sitting on our thumbs doing nothing gonna help either?" Dean scoffs.

The music in the Impala is turned up loud and Dean is drumming on the steering wheel with the palms of his hands. It's true Sam doesn't have a theory more plausible to offer than Dean's. He sighs and looks out the side window at the trees speeding by.

"Hey, remember that hippie chick?" Dean asks. "The alien groupie one?"

Sparrow, Dean means. She'd been a nice girl, in the best sense of the word, carefree and accepting when Sam was a dick about his missing brother, and equally so when Dean returned and interrupted them mid-bang. Sam had fucked her while he planned out who to question in the morning, both at once, multitasking like the cold, soulless pro he'd been at the time. Her open smile had reminded him of Dean's, and it hadn't bothered him; he'd only thought it made her pretty. He hadn't spared a thought for what Dean might be going through. Hadn't been afraid Dean might be dead.

The skin on the back of Sam's neck erupts in goosebumps, and a shiver slides its way down his spine. Dean is talking again (hasn't stopped, if Sam's honest), but the stereo blocks him out, the beat loud enough that Dean's voice slides through it like a counterpoint to the melody.

_That's why they call me /bad company_ —"pretty smile, hot little ass? Robin, maybe?" _—can't deny it._

Why is it so cold? It's early April and the windows aren't down. Dean is gonna fuck this one up, Sam is sure of it. The deaths are too close together to be fae. They don't even know what weapons to bring in.

_Baaad, bad company, til the day_ —"I _said_ , too bad there aren't any crop circles, or you could make a bootie call while I take out the fairies. Are you even listening, Sam?"

There's a pop from the driver's side of the Impala, loud like a gun with a broken silencer, and the car veers sharply to the left. A blur of something green and large, an SUV maybe, smacks against Dean's door and bounces off as Sam looks up in shock. They're in the oncoming lane, tire down it feels like, and Dean is wrestling the wheel, swearing, hauling hard to the right. The Impala fishtails. Metal screeches, and the world spins, and finally everything stops. The car is stalled, diagonal across the shoulder.

Dean's unconscious, slumped against the driver's side window. The windshield is starred where Dean's head hit it. Sam's pulse hammers in his ears and his hands shake as he crawls across the seat, and gathers Dean up in his arms, yelling at him, _wake up, Dean_ , and _I'm sorry, Dean, I'm sorry._ Dean's eyelashes flutter, and he wakes, and he's fine—just a little concussed.

" ' fuck 're you 'pologizing for, you idiot," he slurs.

Sam has no idea. He crawls back across the seat, opens his door, and throws up in the grass.

The doctors at the ER insist on keeping Dean overnight, and over Dean's groggy objections, Sam hands off the case to Max Banes, who thinks it's a little known nature cult. Sam's happy to agree. He sits at Dean's bedside, and shivers over coffee while Dean sleeps off his head injury. When Dean wakes with nightmares, he lets Sam ease him back to sleep by stroking his hair, though he glares Sam away the one time a nurse walks in while it's happening.

Sam tries not to dwell on how relieved he is by the entire outcome. He's not happy Dean is injured, of course he's not. But he can't help noticing how Dean sighs with quiet satisfaction as he falls off to sleep with Sam's hand on his head, how he isn't trying to pawn Sam off on a random girl Sam met once, a single time, six years ago, while Sam was someone he's really not (or at least tries not to be).

And mostly he can't help noticing Dean may be injured, but at least he's safe.

 

-*-*-

By the time Claire gets turned, the pattern is too clear to ignore.

Claire and Dean argue over the safety of the werewolf cure. _You don't get a vote_ , Dean says to Claire. And _back me up,_ he says to Sam.

Sam wants to, but how can he?

Sam isn't angry. Gadreel was four years ago, and nightmares not withstanding, Sam's over it.

But what Sam is—later in the werewolf's cabin, watching Claire writhe on the naugahyde red sofa, werewolf claws and yellow eyes, but all too human screams—is he's absolutely freezing cold.

It's April. He pulls up the weather on his phone. 63 degrees.

Claire twitches restlessly, face scrunched up in a mask of pain, and Dean walks out to get some air. Sam sits there watching Claire and clenching his jaw to keep his teeth from chattering.

The room smells like smoke. Sam gets up and checks for fire. It doesn't take long; it's a small cabin with lots of junk but not many appliances and only two rooms. He sits back down and holds Claire's hand some more.

She pulls through, and it's a victory of sorts, reconciliation all the way around. Mick gets another chance to be decent, Claire another chance to be human. Dean did the medical consent thing better this time through; it's growth, and Sam's grateful.

...Or at least he thinks he's probably grateful. Honestly, he mostly feels numb.

He watches the cabin recede in the passenger side mirror while Claire and Mick chat awkwardly about lessons learned. There's a sharp crack, and an explosion of smoke and shattered glass. Flames leap from the cabin's windows. Sam calls 911 while Dean drives.

"No great loss to society," Dean says as they pull onto the highway.

Hunched tensely in the shotgun seat, Sam can only stab away at the keyboard of his phone, typing search terms furiously. It's him; it's whatever's wrong with him. He's positive now, and he can't ignore it any longer.


	5. Chapter 5

The internet, as always, is helpful, but not helpful enough. By the time they get back to the bunker, Sam's got a decent guess at what the problem is, but no idea how to fix it. He heads to the library and starts relieving the shelves of all their books on Tibetan esoteric lore, Theosophy, and Western mysticism. It makes for an imposing pile on the library table. He should've brewed himself some coffee first.

"Gonna tell me what's going on with you?" Dean asks. "'Cause you look like you swallowed a bug, and all its relatives crawled up your ass."

"Great imagery; thanks for that."

Dean stands back from the table with his arms crossed and frown lines tugging at the corners of his mouth. He might as well be wearing a sign that says ‘whatever you're doing is bad news, but I'll pretend to reserve judgment temporarily if you insist’.

"It's probably nothing," Sam says. "Just a feeling." He wipes dust off the book covers, sorts them into ‘possibly helpful’, ‘probably useless’, and ‘serious long shot but can't be rejected outright’.

"I'll fill you in if I find anything worth following up."

"Sure," Dean says. The reluctance in his voice could crush a truck.

He disappears obligingly enough though, and when Sam startles at a thunk beside his elbow some indeterminate amount of time later, it's Dean with a cup of the coffee Sam neglected to make for himself. Sam swims his way out of his research haze far enough to thank him and then dives back under again. The next thunk is a plateful of homemade double cheeseburger and fries.

The burger is delicious, and at some point Sam remembers to thank Dean for it—not just the meal, but also letting him work. By the time he looks up from his books though, Dean has already retired to bed for the night.  
Sam is overtaken by an aching tenderness for his brother. Dean isn't always the easiest person, but there's no mistaking the depth and sincerity of his love, and in any event, Sam isn't a walk in the park either.

He thumbs through a couple more volumes of _Encyclopædia of Magickal Practices,_ but they don't say anything the other sources haven't already covered. There's probably no point stalling any longer. Sam pushes back his chair, and heads for the dungeon.

 

-*-*-

The storeroom that hides the dungeon isn't what it once was, but its disaster potential put it high on the priority list, so it’s a whole lot better-looking than it was the week following the attack. The shelves have all been righted, and the piles of ash swept up and thrown away. The remains of anything not positively identifiable are in a series of hex boxes lining one of the shelves. There are still burn marks he and Dean haven't gotten around to painting over yet, but the walls are concrete anyway, so it's not like it affects the decor.

The dungeon itself hasn't fared as well though. They've barely touched it, and Sam's not exactly sure why. The scorching on the walls and floor are worse than in the storage area, and the bullseye of starburst black where Sam was standing is intimidating to walk past, as if on approach it might spontaneously recombust. Sam repainted the broken devil's trap himself, but somehow neither of them has yet replaced the ruined table and chair. Maybe they both feel there's been enough torture down here for a while.

Sam finds it surprisingly hard to walk over the threshold and into the dungeon's ruin. He closes the door himself, but still flinches when it clicks home behind him. He supposes it's all for the best though. If the lore is correct, Sam needs to be scared for the summoning; he needs to be reminded of prison, where Lucifer came to him first.

He sits down cross-legged on the hard cement floor, back against the wall, facing the door. He folds his hands in his lap and closes his eyes, does some deep breathing exercises. He imagines he's back at the supermax, builds his cell in his mind's eye: institutional gray-green around him, thin mattress under his ass and crossed legs. It’s cold, colder than the prison. Sam shivers.

"Sam, buddy! You rang?"

Sam opens his eyes. Lucifer is standing over him, dressed this time as Nick. Green tee shirt, sloppy jeans, sad sack face. He's much too pathetic-appearing for Sam to be so deathly afraid of him, but there it is, a conditioned response.

Sam shouldn't call it Lucifer. What summoning the thing required is the opposite of what he needs to do now that it's here. He needs to make it small and weak, not give it anything. No name, no belief, no anger, no fear. _Sam's visitor_ , then. Sam slides himself up the wall until he's upright, face to face with his visitor. He's taller than it is. He looks down at it and dons an expression of hardness, strong but not angry. (Can he even get angry anymore? How long has it been since he's been honestly, downright mad?) He puts on determination, and wears it like a mask.

"Keep away from my brother," he says. His voice is comfortingly flat, no tremor. He sounds commanding, although the thing must know he's scared; it couldn't not.

"Or what?" It asks; a slow, mocking drawl. "You'll go on antipsychotics? Cut your little human hand again? It's a bit late for that, Sam."

"It wasn't a threat. It was an order. Leave my brother alone."

The not-Lucifer thing narrows its all too Nick-like eyes. It makes Sam's palms sweat and his heart skitter wildly in his chest, a reaction more familiar than home (more familiar than anything alive or anywhere on earth). Sam has pissed the Morningstar off, and now he's going to pay.

He fights it down. The thing isn't Lucifer, doesn't own him, he's not in Hell.

"I know what you are," he says.

It's maybe not strictly the truth. There was plenty of lore, no problem there, but it was a contradictory mess of esoteric Buddhism, early 20th century imperialism, Ghostfacers-level crap, and _My Little Pony_ adherents on 4chan. The thing wearing poor dead Nick is too corporeal for a pure thought-form, but a little insubstantial for the kind of tulpa Sam and Dean have faced before. Still, the basics were pretty straightforward.

"I made you," Sam says, the unfortunate truth, as simple as any of Sam's disasters. "Alone. You tried to kill me and couldn't”—Sam doesn't mention how terrifyingly close it came to succeeding—“and I haven't seen you solid a single time since."

The tulpa does Lucifer's infuriating little puppy wiggle thing, the same juvenile happy dance Lucifer always does when Sam forgets he wasn't going to talk to him. And if Sam can't say he's angry exactly (but isn't that good? He's not supposed to feed it his emotions, right?), at the very least, he certainly hates it.

"And you're stupid too," Sam says. "Did you think you could live if I died? I'm all you've got; I'm your only believer."

The tulpa gives an exaggerated shrug. “Fine, Sam. You got me. I thought I was the original, and I made a mistake. Feel better?” It backs away from Sam, hands in its pockets; rocks on it’s heels, Lucifer’s ugly, unruffled smile on its face. “Are we done with our existential crisis now? The scenery’s a bit dull down here. Wanna go for a beer? Chat about the good old days Downstairs?”

“Fuck you.” Sam pushes off from the wall, follows Lucifer—follows the tulpa, because it's not really Lucifer, he needs to remember that—out of the devil’s trap, to the edge of the room. The backs of Sam’s hands sting with a phantom sensation of burning. It crawls up his arms, prickles on the tops of his feet. It’s no big deal. Just memory. It used to happen when he hallucinated too.

The dungeon smells like smoke though, and that’s trouble.

“Stop it,” Sam orders.

“Stop what? You really sure that’s me? Some of the ‘special kids’ were firestarters, and we all know you and Dean love to burn things, Sam my man.”

“It doesn’t matter. We’re the same person. You’re just part of me, and I’m telling you I don’t want this. I don’t want the bunker burned. I don’t want Dean hurt. You're mine; you have to do what I say."

The tulpa’s smile turns sharp. Grows the poisonous bite of a rattlesnake.

"Oh Sammy," it tuts. It takes a step forward and Sam finds himself taking one back. It takes another, and another, until it’s backed Sam up against the concrete wall. "That’s where you’re wrong. I don't have to obey you at all. I have to serve you." The thing reaches out its hand and, god it looks so much like Lucifer, and it strokes Sam's cheek. Sam tries not to flinch.

"And believe me, I am," it says. "Don't get me wrong. I like hurting Dean. Like hurting you too. More than happy to oblige. But don't con a conman, Sam. You hate yourself, and you hate Dean too. You want Dean's blood all over your oh so innocent hands, or I wouldn't be able to take it.”

“I don’t,” Sam says. “You’re lying,” But he’s cold, why is he so cold?

"Am I? Think you want me to stop? Tell you what then Sammy, you call me back when you're surer. Liars make terrible witches."

The tulpa disappears in a flutter of wings.

 

-*-*-

He should tell Dean. Obviously. In the grand scheme of things, the tulpa hasn't done much damage yet. But it's got all Sam’s fucked up feelings, all his years of anger and longing, of Dean holding him too tight and not quite tight enough. Things made of Sam are never for the best, and things made of Sam and an archangel are especially bad.

And how will they kill it? They don’t have an archangel blade, and Michael’s lance is a broken, useless stick of wood.

Sam lays in his bed and forces himself to imagine the tulpa as a ghost, susceptible to a simple salt and burn. He imagines Nick's lips blue, his skin chalk white, his insubstantial body fritzing in and out like shitty cable on a broken TV. He can only hold the image in his mind for a minute, maybe less, before the color starts to leech back into Nick's cheeks.

He tries a demon too, with no better luck, and then Gadreel, Sam's closest association to Lucifer that can still realistically be killed. He falls asleep constructing the strong jaw and cold eyes of the vessel Gadreel was in when he died, but when he wakes, the tulpa is sitting at the bottom of his bed, looking like Nick.

Sam's heart rate shoots sky high; hammering like he's on a hunt, or running for his life.

"I'm made of your fear," the thing offers helpfully. "All that anger you pretend burnt out in the Cage. Your stubbornness and entitlement, your stupid desire for things you can never have. Everything wrong and twisted up about you, and even you must know by now that's plenty

"I guarantee there's nothing in your noggin that'll rep your level of just plain wrong like the devil will. May as well get used to me how I am, and call it a day."

"Get out of my room," Sam snarls.

Lucifer—No, not Lucifer. _The tulpa_. The tulpa disappears.

 

-*-*-

He has to tell Dean.

It scares him, if he's honest. _Gee, Dean, you know how I told you my powers were gone? Guess what._ That should go beautifully. But there's no way around it. He splashes some water on his face, pulls on his sweats, and gets ready to face the day.

Dean is in the kitchen, wearing his dead guy robe, and making breakfast. He's got bedhead and a crease on one cheek, and he looks soft and slightly vulnerable in a way Sam knows will be gone before they're done eating. It makes Sam want to touch him, smooth the crease out, finger comb his hair. The thought passes briefly through his mind, before he quashes it for the sickness that it is, that if Dean was hurt, Sam would be able to do all that and Dean would welcome it. He can almost feel the warmth of Dean’s skin on his fingers, see the little turn of Dean’s torso towards the suturing needle in his hand. They've been stitching and setting and icing each other's injuries for decades. Holding pressure to wounds, cradling each other's bodies when it's too late for pressure to do any good. It's only when Dean is well that Sam isn't allowed.

"I'm going for a run," Sam says, and escapes.

Outside, the day is bright and clear, the trees just beginning to bud new leaves for spring. The pavement feels blessedly solid against Sam's feet as he runs. The burn of the early morning air in his lungs when he picks up his pace for a sprint is the good kind of ache that means hard work and control.

"Really, Sam? You're gonna tell Dean about me?"

The temperature drops, and the tulpa-thing is somehow beside him, pacing him stride for stride. It looks like Jessica this time, blonde hair tied up in a bun, and wearing the same red shorts she'd had on the last time they'd jogged together at Stanford. The whole situation would be comical if it wasn't so horrifying.

"Go away," Sam says, but the tulpa doesn't waver.

"Not that I don't appreciate all the trouble you went through to make me," the thing that isn't Lucifer says, "but you do know tulpa creation takes hardcore magic, don't you? That plus the fire stuff and the telekinesis- and you've probably still got the precognition hanging around somewhere too- it's all quite the selection of demon powers, if I do say so myself. How's Dean gonna feel about it, do you think?"

"He'll deal," Sam says shortly He looks resolutely straight ahead, where the tulpa isn't, concentrates on his heel strike, his arm placement, keeps on running. _Don't talk to it. Don't treat it like it's real._

"But I am real, Sam. And I'm getting stronger."

Sam says nothing. Rounds the turn onto 191. Imagines himself running alone. The sky is a brilliant, cloudless blue.

" 'Course you might be right, and Dean won't put you down like the monster you are over a tiny bit of witchcraft. But then there's the pesky incest too. Think he wants to be held down and fucked unconscious as much as you'd like to do the holding and fucking?"

Jesus, why won’t it shut up? Sam doesn’t want these things- okay, he does want Dean. And maybe he’s mad at Dean sometimes too. But not at all like the tulpa implies.

" 'Cause old Deano sure seems like he's got a guilt complex to me, Sam. Bet he'll think it's his fault you turned out this way."

Jessica's long legs eat up the pavement beside Sam. A wave of grief breaks over Sam's head. She died for his wrongness all those years ago, and how much has he even changed since then? Not much, apparently.

“I'll be strong enough to talk to Dean myself soon,” the tulpa says with Jess' voice. “We should come to an arrangement first."

 

 

-*-*-

He has to tell Dean. The tulpa is ridiculous; out of its crazy, imaginary mind, if it thinks Sam will ever make a deal with it. He’ll tell Dean, and it’ll be bad, but they’ll work it out together somehow.  
Then Cas dies, and it’s too late.

Dean’s grief needs a focus, and Jack is right there in its hurtling path. Jack, who is really, truly innocent, in a way Sam barely remembers and has longed for with a deep, empty melancholy for all of his life.

“You deserved to be saved,” Dean snarls. “He doesn’t.”

Dean’s face distorts with rage. The bunker where they’re arguing is cold as a ghost possession, and Sam is afraid. Dean has it exactly backwards. When Sam tells him about the tulpa (if he ever does, because is he going to now, really?), he should tell him that too.

He tracks down Rowena instead.

 

-*-*-

Rowena is staying in Chicago, in a penthouse suite at the Four Seasons. Sam gets a single at a Motel 6 across town, puts on his Fed suit, and trails her to a bar that could probably clear one of “Richard Sambora’s” credit cards with a single drink. The seats are leather with ridiculously tall backs, the bar is marble, there are floor to ceiling curtains between the tables, and Sam finds it all not only pretentious but also downright ugly.

Rowena is holding court at a corner table. When she notices Sam, she waves an imperious hand, and Sam waits while her companions take their leave.

"Sam Winchester," Rowena greets him, taking a dainty sip of her drink, and not looking the least bit surprised. "To what do I owe the pleasure?"

Sam helps himself to the seat opposite her. The back of his head smacks the chair back. It’s leather and padded, so it’s not like it hurts. But the last time it happened he was probably fifteen.

On the long drive to Chicago he'd rehearsed what parts of the story he'd need to tell her, and what to leave out. He tries the basics first. There's a tulpa; Sam made it and now he can't kill it; it’s destructive, and not a huge fan of Dean.

“Well, we can’t fault it’s taste now can we?”

San rolls his eyes.

“Whatever, Rowena. The point is, it’s dangerous, and if the lore’s right, it’ll only get worse.”

"That's an interesting story," Rowena says archly. "But I'm a busy woman, and I'm afraid altruism isn't in my line of work." She takes another sip of her drink. It’s some sort of aggressively pink concoction and has two entire flowers floating on top.

"Dean and I would owe you a favor."

"If I remember correctly, you already owe me a favor. You also have a grimoire that rightly belongs to me, that I'd very much enjoy having back."

"The _Black Grimoire’s_ not yours, Rowena, and you're not getting your hands on it either."

"In that case, run along now, and come back when you're ready to bargain." She makes a shooing motion with her perfectly manicured nails.

Sam tries not to squirm like a child in his uncomfortably tall, straight, ugly chair. He’d held a tiny hope that perhaps he could avoid this part.

“The tulpa’s Lucifer.”

Rowena puts down her drink and turns the force of her full attention to Sam for the first time of the evening.

"Oh, Samuel," she says, "what have you done?"


	6. Chapter 6

Rowena's suite is outrageously luxurious. The desk in the sitting room is mahogany, and the sofa and chairs are upholstered in buttery, ivory-white leather. The windows are floor to ceiling and look down on the lights of the city below.

Rowena opens the cut glass doors of one of the bookshelves, pulls out a leather-bound volume, and leafs through the pages. "I suppose we’ll begin at the beginning then, Sam,' she says briskly. "You're proficient in spellwork already, from your..."—she wrinkles her nose in distaste—“hunter lifestyle. But you're lacking in foundations. Take this home with you."

She hands the book off to him. It's in a language Sam can't read; possibly Gaelic. He paces over to her desk and sets it down, sits uninvited in one of her expensive leather armchairs. It’s been a long, annoying evening, and isn’t looking like it’ll be over anytime soon.

"Can you get rid of the tulpa or not, Rowena?"

"I'm afraid I haven't kept up on Indo-Tibetan traditions; the theosophists were uncouth. But even if I had, unless you’d like me to send you to the magic summoning circle in the sky, this isn't a problem I can solve for you, Sam. You’re too strong a witch for someone else to dispel a working that’s drawing from your energy. Until you learn to control your power, you’re a danger to the people around you.”

She waves her hand casually, magic trailing behind her fingers like purple fire. "Nochd!" she says. The air in front of her shimmers, glows lavender, and solidifies into the shape of a man.

"Rowena!" the man exclaims happily. He's wearing a tight white T-shirt and even tighter jeans, and looks suspiciously like Chris Hemsworth. He bounds over to Rowena and catches her up in a hug. "What can I do for you today?"

"Sam here has gotten himself into a spot of trouble," Rowena replies. “Sam, this is Críostóir. He’s a thought-form. Not as powerful or independent as a tulpa, but many of the principles of practice are the same.”

Rowena and her thought-form proceed through what seems to Sam to be an interminably long introduction to the principles of witchcraft. Sam, as it turns out, does in fact already know a decent portion of them. Demon-assisted versus natural magic, white versus black and everything in between, syncretism, sympathetic magic, the Rule of Three.

Whenever they get to a topic Sam isn’t already familiar with, Rowena demonstrates, with help—and bonus flirtation—from Críostóir.

“It’s in his nature,” Rowena says, offhand. “He’s created largely from the energy of eros in my own aura. Shame you made your tulpa from less pleasant ingredients, but it’s best to face them and see what work they’re performing for you.”

By the time Rowena gets to _Arrange it so you do what the world wants anyway_ Sam is getting a headache.

Críostóir retrieves some sort of abstract decorative statuary that looks distractingly like a pig from the bedroom, and sets it in the middle of the room. Rowena levitates it, floating it slowly and with obvious effort on a cloud of purple until it comes to rest on the desk.

“Certainly achievable,” she says, “but it was easier to have Críostóir carry it, and easier still—”

She waves a hand and a burst of magic knocks it off the desk. It falls to the carpet and rolls to a stop with it’s semi-abstract pig legs in the air.

"So by 'world' you mean the ‘laws of physics world’?" The conversation has gotten away from Sam, and his headache feels like a drill bit behind his left eye, and he's no closer to getting rid of the tulpa than he was before he drove to Chicago.

He doesn't mean to be bitter. He gets the tulpa is his mistake to fix. But Rowena's never been part of the peace and love contingent; if anything she's even more cynical than Dean, and Sam's starting to suspect she's jerking him around. "Because the 'world' doesn't have consciousness, Rowena, and couldn’t care less whether I turn the tulpa into a pink fluffy bunny, or it grows up big and strong and ends the human race."

"Is that so?" Rowena asks archly, "I had assumed the world included you."

She turns to her magic eye candy of an assistant, and says “Sam appears to be done for the day, Críostóir. If you could return now, please?”

“Of course, Rowena! It was a pleasure, Sam.”

Rowena opens her arms, and Críostóir smiles and walks into her embrace. He holds her in return, glows purple and wavers, loses solidity. Rowena throws back her head, her hair tosses in a nonexistent wind, and a small moan of pleasure escapes her lips. Purple light fills her unfocused gaze, surrounds her body, and the thought-form disappears.

She sighs in satisfaction, adjusts the sleeves of her dress matter-of-factly, and returns her attention to the room around her. Sam is stricken with second-hand embarrassment, but Rowena appears utterly unconcerned.

She retrieves another book from one of the drawers of her desk and tosses it at Sam. Its leather cover has an empty square stamped in the middle in the same spot Sam's father's journal has the letters JW embossed. There's otherwise no title, and no markings, and when Sam opens it, the pages are blank.

"Here's your grimoire, Samuel. Or if you'd prefer to call it a journal, so as not to offend your delicate hunter sensibilities, that's fine too.

"You can put whatever you want in there, but copy a spell of your choosing from the _Black Grimoire_ to start, as payment for today's lesson. Call me when you're ready to meet again. By the power invested in me et cetera and so forth, welcome to membership in the Mega-Coven."

 

-*-*-*-

Sam and Dean are on Route 50, passing Cimarron, when the Impala gets cold.

The tulpa issue has been better lately, since Sam's been practicing. Not that he has it licked or anything—he knows it's still a danger—but there haven't been any incidents in over a month, and while his dreams are no better, the tulpa seldom speaks to him once the lights are on, even inside his head. Much as he hates to admit it, Rowena’s teaching has been invaluable.

But now Sam is freezing, and yeah it’s November, but it can't be _this_ cold. And his anger is nowhere in sight.

"Dude, could you not?" Dean swats his hand off the heater controls. "It's like the surface of the sun in here already."

Dean's frowning, half his attention on the road and half on Sam. His eyes are squinted in the glare off the asphalt from the afternoon sun. He applies the hand he's not driving with to Sam's forehead. When he brings it back to the wheel, he's frowning harder.

"I don't have a fever," Sam says shortly. He zips up his jacket and crosses his arms over his chest, hands tucked under his armpits. He should've bought a heavier coat last time they were at Walmart. This orange thing isn’t cutting it. "Just watch the road. You offed yourself once today already."

Dean makes an irritated tch-ing sound. "You know what, Sam? It worked. Did you touch anything in the asylum? Maybe you're cursed."

Sam leans his head against the side window. When he sighs, his breath frosts the glass.

"I'm not cursed."

He can't stop picturing Dean's body, motionless as a corpse (which is exactly what he was) on the ratty oriental rug. The stupid salt circle he poured while he counted down the three minutes Dean instructed him to wait before he gave the antidote. He's so cold thinking about it, he has to clench his jaw to keep his teeth from chattering.

"Sam, your lips are fucking blue. I know there's something wrong, okay? So you can stop lying about it now. Were you cold before we fought the nutso ghost shrink?"

"No," Sam says. He closes his eyes and leans his head against the window for a nice, argument-ending, pretend nap. Dean turns the stereo up. Robert Plant wails through the Impala's speakers; _leave you when the summer comes, leave you when—_

Why had he done what Dean said? ‘I’m just gonna kill myself, Sam, and you sit here and hold my lifeless body until I feel like coming back’. Who would agree to something like that?

Not that it mattered, since the antidote didn’t work anyway.

The tulpa's cold breath tickles Sam's ear. A gentle pressure strokes through his hair; the ghost of Lucifer's fingers. Sam is starting to tremble from the cold.

"Dean, pull over."

A muscle in Dean's jaw jumps, but otherwise he ignores Sam. They've been on the road barely an hour.

"Pull over. I have to get out of the car."

"Why," Dean says flatly. "You got a big emergency you wanna tell me about or something?"

Why does he have to be such a dick about it? Did he bother to tell Sam he had an emergency so enormous he'd stab himself in the chest with a needle full of cardiac arrest?

"Well it is his job to die, after all," Lucifer's voice says from the back seat. "And yours to stay behind and grieve. You know that, Sammy."

Dean is staring straight ahead at the road. His mouth is set in a hard, angry line and his hands are clenched tight on the steering wheel. He shows no signs of having heard anything from behind him though. Thank god for that.

"Too bad Billie wouldn't take him. Maybe next time, huh? I could help him along a little if you want; there's a loose bolt in the steering column."

Jesus.

"Dean." Sam doesn't try to hide the panic in his voice. This is a panicking kind of situation. "Dean, I'm not kidding. Pull over right this second, or I'll get out anyhow."

Dean looks at him, a quick glance away from the road, but a serious read nonetheless—Sam can see it in the way his expression changes. The anger slides away, replaced by a mix of resignation and concern. Dean's prime directive, unchanged after all these years: take your brother outside as fast as you can, grab your brother and never let go.

Dean eases the Impala onto the shoulder, and Sam wrenches open the car door and escapes out onto the gravel. They're surrounded by fields as far as the eye can see, nothing for miles but topsoil and the broken-off stalks left over from the season's corn harvest.

Sam leans against the side of the Impala and tries to get his breathing under control. He's not sure he's ever been this cold except in Hell.

The tulpa's hands are all over him; in his hair, caressing his face, his chest, lower. It's still not visible at least, but the sensation alone is plenty bad.

"Go away," he hisses.

The driver's side door slams and Dean's footsteps crunch across the blacktop to the shoulder. The Impala rocks as Dean settles against the side panel next to Sam.

"Just tell me what's wrong, Sam. I know you're in trouble."

The setting sun deepens the lines on Dean's face, makes him look old and exhausted.

"He looked fine when he said he'd kill Jack," the tulpa says matter-of-factly in Sam's ear. "Remember that, Sam? When he said he'd kill my son for being born what he is?"

Sam clenches his teeth and forces himself not to respond. But now he can't help remembering the snarling rage that distorted Dean's features when they'd argued over Jack, when he'd called Jack a freak, said he'd inevitably go darkside.

"Sam, I tracked your phone when you were off on one of those 'research trips'," says the real Dean, the one who's beside him in the present. He doesn't sound angry, just frustrated and concerned. "I did some cross-referencing. I know you've been seeing Rowena."

Sam swallows down the lump in his throat. The sun is bright on the horizon. Sam stares at it until his eyes water. Dean killed himself over a couple of ghosts kids they hadn't even used up all their other options on. In whatever fucked up part of his brain feeds the tulpa, even if he can’t locate the feeling, Sam has to be furious. And it's too dangerous to get back in the car. He's finally run out of time.

"You won't like it," he says to Dean.

"I wasn't expecting to."

The tulpa strokes Sam’s cheek. There’s a denseness to the air where it’s standing, a blurriness that Sam can almost see.

"Boy is he gonna be pissed when you tell him," it reminds him. "Remember how well he took Ruby? But hey, no biggie. Go ahead and fight. I'm looking forward to it. You think those cornstalks burn?"

"Okay," Sam says. He ignores the insubstantial thing beside him; turns his eyes to his brother. "Okay, I'll uh- fuck. Listen, Dean. I can't get back in the car with you. And I can't explain why. You're gonna have to go ahead of me, find a hotel. Text me and I'll meet you there. I'll uh..." The highway is deserted. "Hitch. Or call an uber."

"Sam, no. I'm not leaving you on the side of the road freezing to death from some supernatural shitstorm I don't even know what the fuck it is."

Dean's not gonna leave him. Of course he isn't. Dean thinks he's in danger. (He is in danger.)

Sam slumps down to the ground, sits with his back against the car door, knocks his head against the metal.

"Go check the steering column."

Dean raises an eyebrow, and Sam says _just go check it, Dean_ , and to his credit, Dean grabs the toolbox from the trunk without further comment. Sam does his best to collect himself while Dean works. When Dean's finished, he comes back over, grease staining his shirt and smeared across his forehead, hair standing up in little spikes from sweat.

"A bolt was loose," he confirms.

Sam drags himself to his feet. He gives Dean instructions while he fetches a sharpie from the glove compartment: Do his back for him. Remind him what he's doing. Don't let him smudge off the drawings until everything's ready. Salt circle. Candles. There's a book of spellcraft at the bottom of Sam's duffle if Sam can't remember what sigils to draw at the hotel.

Dean looks grim, but doesn't interrupt.

Sam takes off his flannel and tee. The air on his bare chest is as cold as the inside of a meat locker. He hasn't tried this before. He’s not at all sure it’ll work. He—all of him, as a whole—could cross the anti-angel warding when he drew it on the bunker wall, though it was difficult. Still, short of having Dean knock him out completely, it’s the only idea he’s got.

He draws the anti-angel sigil on his chest from memory, and hands off the sharpie to Dean.

Then he—

 

-*-*-

"Dean," Sam says, "Stop ignoring me, dude, I gotta get out."

It looks to be about twilight, and they're in the Impala, possibly somewhere in the Midwest. Sam for the life of him cannot remember why.

Something's wrong though, because he feels terrible. He's got bugs crawling under his skin, and he's gonna throw up, and Dean is being an even huger dick than usual and won't answer Sam's questions or stop the car. It'll serve him right when Sam pukes all over his precious Baby, which he's pretty sure is gonna happen any minute now.

Dean sighs. "You don't have to get out, Sam. There are no bugs, you're not gonna puke, leaving won't help, and we're almost there."

"Almost where?"

"The hotel."

"What hotel?"

"Jesus Sam, if I'da known you'd turn back into a four year old, I never would've agreed to this plan. And stop wiggling around. You'll smear the sigil on your back."

There's a sigil on his back?

There's a plan? A plan about what?

"Why is there a sigil on my back, Dean?"

"I don't know, Sam. Probably 'cause you're an idiot."

....Huh.

Well, that's certainly plausible.

 

-*-*-

"Dean, pull over."

It's dark out. They're driving somewhere Sam can't remember, and there's something wrong with him that he can't remember either. He's nauseous, and his skin itches so bad he wants to tear it off, and he's antsy and restless and needs to leave the car, get away, go somewhere—anywhere, as long as it's not where he is.

"You're fine," Dean says. "Well, not fine. Probably pretty fucking terrible actually, and I have no idea why, because your stupid ass wouldn't tell me. It has something to do with angels though. Don't scratch your back."

Dean turns up the stereo.

 

-*-*-

"Dean, I need to-"

"Shut up, Sam."


	7. Chapter 7

Sam is sitting on the floor of a motel room, naked from the waist up. He's holding a washcloth covered in smudged black ink, and there's a thin, undersized towel beside him. He remembers everything.

"Here," Dean says, and hands him a T-shirt and a flannel overshirt. Sam pulls the tee over his head.

Dean steps over the curved line of the salt circle Sam is sitting at the center of. Just beyond the salt are candles for him to focus his attention and power with, and beyond them is a ring of fire. Sam suggested the protective circle and the focusing tools. Not the fire. It's a smart extrapolation though.

The room is ugly but spacious. The furniture is all upholstered in pink and red chintz, and is currently pushed back against the walls to make room for the dual circles. The prints on the walls are cheap reproductions of flirtatious Impressionist ladies in long skirts and flowered hats and gentlemen with canes attempting to gain their favor.

Dean walks easily through the flames, and ambles over to an alcove-ish area that's too small to be a kitchenette exactly, but that holds the obligatory hotel mini-fridge and coffee pot.

He grabs a beer, cracks it, and wanders over to one of the beds to sit down. The bedspread is a cheap red satiny material, and it reflects off his skin and colors his cheeks like he's blushing. His expression is flatly dangerous though, and his eyes are hard. He picks up an angel blade off the bed and spins it in the hand not holding his beer.

"Talk," he says to Sam. "Who are you, and why are you in my brother."

"Dean, it's not—" Sam starts. But Dean's eyes widen and then track away to a spot behind Sam. His shoulders tense and his mouth thins into a wary line. He puts the beer down, and moves the angel blade to his right hand, pretense of casualness abandoned.

"Time to spill the beans?" asks the thing behind Sam sweetly. Ice slides down Sam's spine. The voice is new, but the cold is entirely too familiar. It can only be the tulpa back there, and fuck, it's visible, and not just to Sam. Dean can see it too.

Sam gathers his feet under himself to stand, take a defensive position (much good that it’ll do him). The tulpa's hand comes down on his shoulder and squeezes possessively. It's solid and heavy as a human’s, inflexible as an angel’s. The thumb is positioned right on the cluster of nerves by the tip of Sam’s shoulder blade. The pressure isn't bad enough to hurt, but the threat is clear. Sam stays sat.

"Don't you worry your little head about it, Sammy," the tulpa says, in its brand new not-Nick voice. "I got your back. I know you and Dean and the truth don't mix, so you just let me do all the talking."  
Whose voice is that? It sounds an awful lot like—

"After all," it says, sweet and cloying as poisoned sugar, "I live to serve, now don't I?"

Yeah, Sam's pretty sure now. It doesn't sound all that much like what he hears from the inside when he speaks, but he recognizes it from his voice mail greeting, from Dean playing back saved messages from Sam on speaker phone, from Leviathan-him and Dean on the news, murdering a dinerful of innocents. It's Sam's own voice the tulpa is speaking with.

"Sam?" Dean uncoils from his seat on the bed at the edge of the room, angel blade at the ready. "Wanna tell me what that thing behind you is?"

The tulpa's hand digs into Sam's shoulder.

"Oh come on, Dean. Don't you recognize me?" It asks. "Thought the pretty meatsuit would clue you in. Thanks by the way, Sam. The new bod's my favorite."

Sam wrenches around, fighting off the blinding stab of pain as the tulpa’s thumb digs into the nerves of his shoulder. His eyes water and his hand goes numb, but he manages enough of a turn to see that sure enough, there behind him, grinning Lucifer's condescending shark's grin, is Sam. Or at least Sam's body, albeit with someone else on the inside.

It's not Sam as he knows himself now though. The haircut is wrong, the body stockier than Sam's. Sam hasn't had that green fatigue jacket in years. Since—

Oh.

Since Hell.

Jesus, there’s blood on the tulpa's knuckles too, and Sam would bet anything it’s Dean’s; not the real, now-Dean's, but Dean's from long ago, when Lucifer almost beat him to death with Sam's hands. The thing in the circle of fire with Sam is Lucifer at Stull.

"Get out of me," Sam says flatly.

"Hey, I'm not the one who put me here, pal. That's all on you," the tulpa gripes. It's got a shifty look in its eyes (Sam's eyes), and for the first time ever, it sounds actually irritated.

Dean shifts his position, gets a better sight line; wary. "What's going on, Sam? Is that Lucifer?"

"No," Sam says.

"Yes," says the tulpa.

Dean throws the angel blade.

It flashes end over end until it ricochets off the tulpa's chest and thumps dully on the carpet. The tulpa brushes the front of its shirt. There's a rip in the fabric, over the heart.

"He wrecked your shirt," the tulpa says. “How rude.”

The tulpa itself is completely uninjured.

"Sam," Dean warns.

"I think he's mad at us, Sammy." Sam's arm is already a useless mass of pins and needles below the sunburst of nerve pain at his shoulder. But now the tulpa's power, rather than just its physical strength, flows out through it’s hand, and the pain starts to spread unnaturally, flowing like molten fire through Sam's chest, constricting his lungs, swirling like a whirlpool into his belly. The tulpa pushes down and Sam folds, body crumpling into a little curled up heap laying on its side on the tacky motel carpet.

The tulpa stands over him like a statue of a conquering general.

"I never tried that stage four stomach cancer thing Zachariah liked so much," it says. "First time for everything though, right Deano? Put out the fire."

Sam coughs. There’s an anvil on his chest, pressing his lungs into the ground, but he manages to wheeze out _It can't kill me._

"I wouldn't count on that," it says to Dean. It drags Sam to the inside edge of the circle, Sam's feet kicking against the carpet, struggling for purchase. "That was me in the dungeon."

Sam wants to say it'll die too if it kills him, that the thing won't risk it, but the tulpa tightens the fist of its power, and Sam can't get enough air to speak. He wraps protectively around the agony in his belly, useless for anything else.

Dean comes up to the circle's edge from the other side and stamps a section of the flame out with his boot. Line broken, the rest of the fire gutters and dies.

The tulpa relaxes its hand, and Sam drags in a desperate breath. All his pain is gone, banished back to nowhere as abruptly as it was called. The tulpa walks casually past Dean, out into the room at large.

"We should chat," it says.

 

*-*-*

What comes next is the most ridiculous hostile negotiation Sam has ever had the displeasure to witness. The tulpa sits on the red and pink floral love seat with its feet up on the end table, drinking a beer. Dean stands with his arms crossed over his chest, a look of barely banked anger on his face. His own beer lays abandoned on the floor. No one has bothered to move the furniture back to its original locations, so their pissing contest is taking place in a miniature highway pileup of over-ruffled chintz at the edge of the room, while the entire center area is an expanse of empty carpet stained by oil and decorated with salt.

Sam is sitting in the not-quite-a-kitchenette, across the room, where the two cheap chairs and particleboard table are the only remaining pieces of furniture not squished right next to the embodied manifestation of all Sam’s anger and fear.

"You can’t kill me,” the tulpa says to Dean, “and much as I'd love to, Sammy here's a hard taskmaster, and there’s some silly fine print and so forth about not defying his wishes, so I can't quite manage to off you yet either. How about a truce instead?”

It sticks out its hand like there’s any chance in Hell Dean might actually shake it. “What do you say, Dean? Frenemies?"

"While you level up into a second actual Satan?” Dean says. “Fat fucking chance."

The tulpa shrugs, and studies its nails. "Fine by me. Guess I'll cripple you and keep you as a hostage for Sam’s behavior instead. He hasn't been very nice to me recently." It thumps its boots down onto the carpet, gets to its feet. "Kinda hurts my feelings actually, just a little."

Oh crap.

Sam starts to rise too.

"Stay," the tulpa says, without even turning to look at Sam. It makes a vague gesture in Sam’s direction and Sam’s chair skids backwards across the floor, him still in it, and smashes into the wall behind it. The tulpa’s power is an unnatural sideways gravity that presses Sam against the slats of the chair back, and the chair back into the plaster. The base of Sam’s skull hits the wall hard, and the edges of his vision gray. Sam’s legs slip between the chair legs, pushed “down” toward the wall behind them, and the edge of the seat cuts into the backs of his thighs. His hands are trapped uselessly against his chest. He can’t move at all.

The tulpa ambles up to Dean and looms over him, and Dean doesn't retreat, because retreat isn't in Dean’s nature. They stand chest to chest, and there's almost something intimate about it. Sam's younger body, more heavily muscled than it is today, is frighteningly large with Lucifer’s posture filling it out. Dean has to tilt his head back to look the tulpa in the eye. His hands are at his sides, and although his jaw is firm and his expression is the gunmetal flat one he wears when he’s at his most dangerous, Sam can see the fear in the convulsive bob of his throat when he swallows. He looks achingly fragile to Sam, his courage too thin an armor to protect the weakness of his human flesh and bone.

"Leave him alone," Sam demands. It sounds distressingly like a plea.

"Hmm." The tulpa cocks its head to one side, considering. It eyes Dean like a piece of meat, corner of its mouth tipping up when its gaze hits the crotch of Dean’s jeans. "Don't think I wanna. Why would that be, Sam? Should I tell him?"

Dean moves one hand behind his back, and Sam can see the storm approaching, Dean and the tulpa balanced hair-trigger on the edge of the fight that will decimate Dean. Sam’s heart is racing, cold sweat sliding down his back between the aching lines where the slats of the chair press into his skin.

"Sam missed you in Hell," the tulpa says, low.

"Stop it," Sam begs. No use pretending it's anything else.

"The way he feels about you, Dean, it's unnatural. But then our little Sammy’s always been a bit off."

A muscle jumps in Dean’s jaw.

Sam struggles against the weight pushing him motionless. His own muscles bunch, and his tendons cord, and blood drips from his nose. The plaster cracks behind him, and bits break off and land around his feet and in his hair. The room starts to smell like smoke again. He still can't move.

"First time I did Sammy in Hell,” the tulpa purrs, “I made myself look like you. He cried after, but I think he liked it."

The tableau snaps. Dean breaks back a step, and his hand comes out from behind him with his 1911 in his grip. He's snarling, and he shoves it up under the tulpa's chin and fires point blank. A gunshot cracks, and then the tulpa waves its hand. Dean flies across the room, slams into the wall behind him. Bounces off it into a broken heap on the floor. The tulpa picks the 1911 up from where Dean dropped it and tosses it on the kitchenette table.

"Ouch," he says, and then, "Just kidding. Didn't hurt at all."

Dean gets an elbow under him and a palm flat on the floor, tries to get to his feet. It makes Sam’s stomach ache. The tulpa’s only going to hurt Dean more; why won’t he ever just stay down?

"Goddamn you, Lucifer," Sam snarls, still struggling, getting nowhere. "You know I don't want this."

The tulpa just smiles though. "Aww, Sammy, you called me by my name," it says, and drags Dean to his feet by his shirt collar. "I don't mind sharing. I'll let you stitch him up when I'm done."

It slams Dean against the wall, throws punches while it holds him there. Dean moans, and his head snaps back when the tulpa connects with his jaw, but he does his best to go down fighting. He knees the tulpa in the groin, jabs at its eyes, tries to twist out of its grip on his shirt.

"Know how bad your baby brother's got it for you, Deano?” the tulpa asks while it beats him bloody. “Remember how he woke up in that hotel room and took off like an idiot in his bare feet?” It switches its grip, gets Dean by the neck. “He was gonna come back.”

It’s got one of its legs (Sam’s legs) between Dean’s, and it lifts Dean off the ground by his neck, so the toes of Dean’s boots barely touch the carpet, and cants its hips so one hip bone is pressed up against Dean’s groin.

“Let him go,” Sam begs. The coffeemaker in the kitchen alcove explodes, sending bits of plastic and Pyrex shrapnel flying across the room. Plaster rains down from the ceiling. The bedspread on one of the beds catches fire.

The tulpa ignores him.

“He thought you’d made a deal with me to heal him,” it hisses at Dean, it’s face so close to Dean’s that it’s practically kissing him. Dean pries ineffectively at its fingers around his neck. His face is dusky above the hand around his throat. (The hand that looks exactly like Sam’s.)

"Me, Dean. Not just any old stranger with a halo and a little grace to spare. Alastair was a lightweight, you know that, right? And Sam _still_ wasn't really gonna leave you."

Dean wrenches in the tulpa’s grip to face Sam.

"Sam?" he rasps out. He’s gasping for breath, and that’s bad enough, but he also sounds lost; unmoored and alone.

“Dean, I—” Sam’s not sure what to say, what part he’s supposed to deny.

Dean lets his grip on the tulpa’s fingers go. His hands drop to his sides.

"It’s not like it sounds, Dean; any of it," Sam says desperately, and then to the tulpa; “Take your goddamn hands off my brother.”

The tulpa doesn't move an inch. Doesn't even look away, smiles at Dean like a rattlesnake while it talks to Sam.

"Make me," it says.

Sam tries.

He really does.

He shuts his eyes, right there with Dean half unconscious against the wall, with the tulpa's hand around Dean's throat, holding him off the floor, and its hip rocking up against Dean’s pelvis. Sam works on his breathing, does Rowena’s centering exercises in his mind, resolutely imagines the tulpa away, even though Dean's just letting it happen, all the fight gone out of him, and he can hear Dean wheezing helplessly around the pressure on his airway, and Sam's afraid to take his eyes off Dean, terrified he'll open them and Dean will be dead.

But he does; he tries. The thing won't stop. Won't disappear. It doesn't even flicker.

"You want me to hurt him" it says.

Sam doesn't. He knows he really doesn't (not like this; this isn't right).

Dean looks almost as bad as he did at Stull. The memory of Lucifer beating him with Sam's hands is so visceral Sam's knuckles ache. Dean didn't fight that time either. Dean's face was black with bruises, one eye swollen shut, and Sam had almost let Lucifer—

God, he'd almost—

He hadn’t though. He’s managed to stop Lucifer, the real Lucifer, if only briefly.

"Hey—" Sam says to the tulpa. He clears his throat; starts again, louder, more firm, "Hey, I want to talk to Sam."

The tulpa snarls _shut up_ at him over its shoulder, holds Dean off the ground entirely.

"Now," Sam says. "He’s in there too. I know he is, and I want to talk to him.” It’s a simple request; less complicated (and if he’s honest, less provoking of ambivalence), than _don’t hurt Dean_ is. “You have to let me."

Dean slides down the wall and collapses onto the floor. The tulpa turns around.

Its eyes are wide with surprise. It looks down at its blood-covered hands, and then back up at Sam.

"Sam," the tulpa says, as if seeing him for the first time ever.


	8. Chapter 8

"Hey there," Sam greets the tulpa carefully. The pressure pushing him back against his chair is gone, and he extricates his legs from between the chair legs and gets himself slowly to his feet.

The tulpa has its arms hugged tight around its chest like it's shocky or freezing cold. It's eyes are showing too much white. It looks young, and to Sam at least, frankly terrified. He'd been so angry for so long, and then at the end, just determined and scared.

Sam holds his hands palm out at shoulder height beside himself. "I'm not gonna hurt you," he says. "Do you, uh. You know who I am?"

"Yeah," the Sam-tulpa says. "I have all your memories, just like Lucif—like the other me did."

From the floor beside the Sam-tulpa's foot, Dean groans. Sam and his doppelganger turn to him in unison, a sunflower field of two, turning toward their battered, semi-unconscious sun.

He's beat to shit, lying in an uncoordinated heap on the carpet where the tulpa dropped him. One of his eyes is swollen shut and the other's only halfway open. His neck is a mass of fresh bruising, most of it still angry red, but some of the damage over his trachea beginning to deepen to black. His lower lip is split and he's holding his ribs like they hurt when he breathes. There are dark stains soaking through his overshirt along one side and down an arm, and the wall behind him is smeared with blood.

Sam walks through the smudged remains of the salt circle and across the miniature oil slick that used to be a holy fire, while the tulpa helps Dean sit up. They lift him under the arms between them, get his feet on the ground, and steer him toward one of the beds. The other bed is still smoldering, tiny edges of flame eating sluggishly across the bedspread, the fire mostly thwarted by the retardants in whatever cheap synthetic it was made from.

"Table," Dean wheezes, so they sit him in front of the particleboard table instead.

Sam goes over to the bed fire and smothers what's left of it with a pillow. The rest of the room is a disaster too, but it'll have to wait.

Dean sits at the table with his unsecured 1911 in front of him where the tulpa threw it, and doesn't check it or return it to his waistband. He doesn't make any stupid jokes or complain about the TV remote being missing. He's silent and almost still, and it makes Sam's heart ache, because Dean is never either of those things.

The tulpa fetches two beers from the mini-fridge, puts one on the table beside Dean's gun.

"Thanks," Dean says. He's not wheezing anymore at least, but his voice is still raspy. Quiet too; subdued.

"Sorry," the tulpa says, and gestures to its throat.

Dean shrugs. "Wasn't your fault." His eyes skitter off the tulpa's hand, and land on Sam instead. He mouth tips down, disapproving, and Sam wonders if he means it was the Lucifer part of the tulpa's fault, or if he means it was Sam's.

Dean brings his beer to his lips, and takes a tentative swallow. When it goes okay, he tips back his head and takes a longer one. His adam's apple bobs, and it emphasizes the swelling on his neck. Sam's stomach does a queasy little flip. Guilt, Sam's sure, but also he thinks, something inappropriate and worse.

The tulpa holds its other beer out to Sam.

"Is Lucifer still, uh—fuck," Sam doesn't know how to put it without making it worse. "Is all that other stuff gone?"

"No," the tulpa says simply.

Sam declines the beer. Nothing's solved. The tulpa's politer now, but it's still got Lucifer's power trapped inside it. And the real Sam only held the real Lucifer at bay for minutes. They can't expect this one to do it forever, even if it seems to be having no particular problem at the moment.

"We should check you for bleeding," the tulpa says to Dean, "maybe tape up your ribs."

Dean shrugs obediently out of his overshirt. His arm has a wound that's still oozing and probably needs stitches. The tulpa asks about his T-shirt, but Dean doesn't take it off. He looks away, frowning. Says his ribs are fine. His tone is sharp, and the tulpa lets it go without comment.

Mostly though, they seem okay with each other, and Sam leaves them to it; heads down the hall with the ice bucket and the Impala's keys. He bangs on the side of the ice machine until it spits out a measly half-bucket of ice, and then he walks out to the parking lot and grabs the first aid kit from the Impala's trunk.

Physically, Sam himself is relatively unhurt. He'll probably bruise down his back where the slats of the chair were squashed against his skin, maybe a little along the backs of his thighs, but otherwise he's fine. Emotionally, he's not so sure.

When he gets back to the room, Dean is holding a towel wadded up against his injured bicep, and the tulpa is picking jagged bits of broken coffee pot off the carpet.

Sam gives the first aid kit to the tulpa, and makes a couple of cold packs for Dean out of ice dumped in ziplock bags. Dean lets the tulpa stitch up the wound on his arm. They're both quiet. Dean looks mostly at the floor. He accepts the cold packs from Sam with a grimace, holds one to his developing shiner.

"So, ten months that thing's been running around loose," he says flatly. "Were you planning on ever telling me?"

"I'm sorry," Sam says.

He means it. He's been sorry all along. Even when he was actively hiding the tulpa from Dean, he was sorry then too. Does it make him any less culpable? Probably not.

Dean nods gracelessly, a single jerk of his head.

"I could use a drink," he says.

There's a drink right there in front of him, El Sol's finest, and there’s JD in the first aid kit if he wants something stronger than beer. He means he needs to get away from Sam.

"Okay," Sam says.

"Mini-You said the devil'll wait til tomorrow."

"Okay."

"You really thought I'd feed you to Lucifer?"

He sounds so hurt.

There's nothing to say.

Dean grimaces. Tulpa-Sam ties off his stitch job and helps Dean back into his overshirt. There's blood on the plaid, but it's a dark colored shirt and it hides stains well. Dean levers himself carefully up from the table, and winces. He retrieves his gun finally, tucks it into his waistband, fishes his keys out of the pocket of his jeans.

He looks small and defeated, and Sam wants to hold him. Wants to finger comb the blood out of his hair, and tuck him into bed in a world that doesn't exist, where monsters aren't real and they haven't hurt each other almost worse than their enemies have.

The tulpa stands there watching Dean make leaving motions too though, and its back—

But is that really fair? Is this cut off piece of Sam that's now stuck holding all the worst parts, all the parts of Sam he hates the most, is that an _it_ while the rest of Sam gets to be a _he?_

 _His_ back then—is tight and ramrod straight. A muscle jumps in his jaw—an exact replica of Sam's jaw, and Sam can almost feel himself, younger and less chastened, clenching his teeth to keep his anger from leaking out.

It never worked as well as he wanted, and maybe that's how they arrived at this juncture, Sam's anger packed away like a cursed object behind stronger and stronger walls, until it wasn't inside him at all anymore.

"You would," the tulpa says. "You'd take the deal."

Dean's almost to the door. He turns around.

"You think you wouldn't, but he's Lucifer, Dean, and you would. He's got all the time and power in the world, and he acts like an idiot, but he's the Father of Lies."

Dean opens his mouth to retort, and Sam's glad actually, because it means he's still got some fight left after all. But tulpa-Sam rolls right over him.

"He'd offer you Sam part-time. Claim Sam'd be in some Happy Special Cheerleader Land when he wasn't with you—"

"Sam—" Dean says. He means the tulpa, not the "real" Sam, and maybe that's not wrong. Maybe it's fair.

"Sam doesn't even like cheerleaders. He doesn't even care, and he still got—fuck, he’d get, whatever, because he—" The tulpa makes an inarticulate noise of frustration. His jaw thrusts forward and his nostrils flare, but he has that puppy dog crinkle between his eyebrows too, and to Sam he looks sad and earnest and terribly young.

"Sam—" Sam and Dean both say at once. Dean starts back across the room towards Sam's younger self, conciliatory.

"No, both of you shut up! Listen for once in your goddamn lives. You'd do it, because as long as Sam's alive, there's still a chance."

The crinkle disappears, and that’s how fast it is, grief packed away, and now he just looks like the stranger Sam saw in the mirror when Dean was in Hell, when Sam had nothing but Ruby and rage.

"Who even cares whether Lucifer's lies are plausible or not?” he growls, “It doesn't even matter. You expect me to believe you wouldn't think _maybe I can still save him, I'll just buy a little time and maybe I still get him back?_ What's a few measly years of the devil in your brother's head compared to that?"

Dean pales, face drained of color.

"And you know what else?!" The tulpa is yelling now, shoulders rigid with anger, one hand in a fist at his side, the other still holding the suturing thread between pressure-white fingers.

Sam should stop him, try to calm him down, but—

"Sam doesn't even blame you! He knows Dad fucked you up but good, and he finished you off by jumping in the pit. He doesn't expect you to be sane! He thinks he's lucky to have you the way you fucking are!"

"That's enough," Dean says to the tulpa. (To Sam, right? Isn't he really talking to Sam?) He squares his shoulders, shakes off his sympathy.

"It's not even _near_ enough!" the Sam-tulpa snarls at his brother. "You think it ruined you watching Sam jump into Hell? Guess how many times Sam's watched you die, Dean? Guess! Have you been counting?"

"I don't have to listen to this shit." Dean turns away. He jerks the door open, retreats out it, and slams it closed again.

The tulpa stalks over and yanks it back open.

"A hundred and seventeen!" he yells out into the dark. His back heaves like he's running a marathon.

Footsteps recede across the parking lot, and _shut up, Sam_ drifts back on the breeze.

Sam already knows what's coming next.

Of course he does, because the tulpa is Sam, and he argues like Sam, and he’s holding the coup de grace in his hand like an angel blade.

"Oh wait!” he screams at Dean, at the universe that keeps taking Dean away. “That was _yesterday!_ A hundred and _eighteen now!"_

A car door slams and the Impala's engine growls to life. The tulpa turns back around to Sam. Sucks a bead of blood off the tip of his finger.

"Crap, " he says, and gives a shaky laugh, "Forgot I was holding a needle."


	9. Chapter 9

In the quiet of Dean's departure, Sam and tulpa-Sam move furniture.

The room is a loss. There are chunks of ceiling on the floor and oil stains soaked into the carpet. The bed whose bedspread was on fire has scorch marks baked into the mattress, and the smoke detector can only be shorted out, because it never went off and the room smells like an industrial disaster.

Dean will never use whatever credit card he registered under again. Sam still needs someplace to sleep tonight though, and he'd rather it wasn't pushed up against the wall and right underneath the room's only window, so they clean up anyhow. They drag the beds back to the hotel standard position for doubles, and distribute the nightstands beside them, and the TV against the opposite wall.

The tulpa wipes the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand. He wanders into the bathroom, clatters around in there for a minute or two, and comes back out drinking tap water from a plastic cup.

"You should shoot me," he says.

A better person would be shocked.

Sam though has killed pieces of himself before. He remembers the resistance of his Hell self's flesh giving way before his knife, the solid drag of its body as it slumped to the ground. The parts that felt like a salt and burn, rather than a murder—the warm light streaming out of its corpse and into Sam, the body dissolving like mist on a summer day—those had only come afterwards.

"Dean shot you once already," he says.

The tulpa puts down his empty water cup. He squeezes the finger he pricked with the suturing needle until a drop of blood appears at the tip, and shows it to Sam. "I was Lucifer then. I can hold him. He won't be able to heal me."

Sam pinches the bridge of his nose, lets his eyes unfocus to think. "Okay," he says, but it's temporizing, not agreement.

He doesn't want to kill his younger self. He's not sure why it makes him feel so queasy. He disposed of his soulless and his Hell selves easily enough. He certainly hadn't enjoyed it, but he'd done what he needed to.

He paces a little. Fires up his laptop. He knows nothing will be there; If Rowena doesn't have an answer, the internet certainly won't.

He wishes he could just recall tulpa-Sam into himself like Rowena did with her… whatever that was. Her face when she’d welcomed it home had been, well, embarrassingly intimate; more information than Sam needed to know about a three hundred year old witch.

But her projection or whatever had also been a part of herself she wanted back.

_I'm not surprised you're unable, Samuel,_ she'd said, _Even you couldn't be so masochistic as to truly want Lucifer back inside you._

He'll still be getting 'Lucifer', even if it’s wrapped in another Sam now. And he can’t give that evil thing cuddle therapy; he just can’t. So there it is he guesses.

The tulpa watches him calmly as he gets back up from the table and draws his Taurus. His hands don't tremble too badly, no more than adrenaline could account for. He points his gun at his younger self.

"Okay." It's just him. A part of him.

He adjusts his grip. Thumbs off the safety.

It shouldn’t be hard. A head shot, point blank. The tulpa will fade into light and disappear. (He hopes.)

(Maybe it won’t. Maybe it’ll splatter brain matter all over the wall, and lie there with an ugly, gaping hole in its head while it bleeds and seizes on the ratty carpet.)

The tulpa waits.

Sam's pulse pounds in his ears and his palms sweat. The Taurus' grip gets slippery, and his arms ache from being held extended too long.

"Sorry," he says, and clicks the safety back on. He doesn’t know why he can’t. He returns his gun to his belt.

The tulpa rolls his eyes, but his long, shaky sigh seems less exasperated than it does relieved. He gets himself another cup of water, and sits down in front of the laptop Sam vacated. Sam retrieves his weapons bag from the edge of the room, starts putting away some of the smaller stuff they haven't gotten to yet. It's something to do with his hands, calm himself so he can think. He collects the candles lying strewn between the remains of the salt circle and the ring of fire, wipes them down, wraps them in a linen cloth, and returns them to the bag.

He was doing okay, before the asylum, keeping the tulpa mostly contained. Dean offing himself never goes well for Sam's grip on coping. And vice versa, Sam supposes. Neither of them has the firmest grip on life, and neither is the patron saint of mental health.

His hands find his grimoire at the bottom of the bag, and he thumbs through it absently while he tries to come up with a plan. Healing spells, dream divination, several finding spells. Nothing useful, but that’s not surprising. It’s not like he’d write anything too dangerous into a book Rowena could get her hands on. He’s been sorting and copying out spells from the Black Grimoire for months now, to give her as payment for her lessons. But he’s careful which go in his journal, and hence to her, and which stay only in his head.

And of course, that’s when it comes to him, the way he can do it after all; when he’s scrolling down his mental list of spells too dangerous and unethical to let near someone untrustworthy like Rowena (like himself). He doesn’t want Lucifer back; of course he doesn’t, who would? But more than that, he doesn’t deserve the damn thing back. It’s his fear and anger, sure. But it’s his power too. And if it’s Sam’s power, then it must be bad, and he shouldn’t have it.

But for Dean, that’s a different story. Sam’s already proven, more than once, that when push comes to shove, if it’s for Dean, he doesn’t care about ‘deserve’. He only cares about ‘possible’.

“Okay,” he says again. He stretches the tension out of his shoulders, takes a deep breath. “I can do it. I want you back.”

Tulpa-Sam raises a skeptical eyebrow.

“I’m not gonna shoot you. Let’s um, just do the Rowena thing.”

God, how embarrassing. Dean would have a field day.

But the tulpa grins, says “We’ll describe it to him in vivid detail. Maybe we should burn some patchouli first; throw up a couple of peace signs. Wouldn’t want to disappoint him.”

He approaches Sam tenderly, cups his cheek and brushes his hair back. Puts his arms around Sam like a lover.

It’s nice.

There's the safety and solidity of an embrace, and there's warmth. And then it’s too warm, less nice, hot all around Sam, and then all in him, and a buzzing, like pins and needles. Overwhelming, blinding light. And then the tulpa's gone.

Sam doesn't feel any different.

 

-*-*-

Dean comes back to the motel room late, singing _Free Bird_ off-key, smelling of tequila, and feeling no pain. He glances off the door frame with his shoulder coming in.

"You drove like that?" Sam asks.

"Fuck off, Sam," Dean says cheerfully.

He's got a bag from the Gas 'n Sip, and he roots around in it, pulling stuff out and making uncoordinated piles on the table Sam's sitting at. "Figured you'd be asleep by now, but I bought you rabbit food just in case." He plops down one of those prepackaged convenience store salads that used to be horrible but nowadays comes with bacon bits and feta and stuff, puts a packet of Sam's favorite salad dressing and a plastic knife-fork-napkin pack next to it. "You want it now?"

Sam shakes his head. Dean keeps sorting.

"Power bars and donuts for the morning. Some trail mix for Mini-You. Real-You was going through a trail mix phase back then, right? Jerky for later in the car. Ho-Hos for me." He stops mid-sort and looks around, like he hadn't thought of it until now. "Where's Mini-You?"

"Gone. He let me reabsorb him."

"Kinky," Dean says and waggles his eyebrows. He doesn't comment further though, and Sam cant help thinking his heart's not in it.

Dean tosses the perishables in the fridge, strips off his flannel, throws it over a chair back. The skin around the cut on his arm is bruised and puffy, but the stitches are clean and even.

The bruising on his throat looks worse, a black and purple collar nearly encircling his neck. His voice sounds okay though.

Sam gets the JD out of the first aid kit, and pours them each a plastic hotel cupful.

"We need to talk," he says.

Dean rolls his eyes. He takes a generous swallow of his whiskey. Sighs and sits down opposite Sam at the dinky little table.

"Fine," he says, and rubs his chest where he jabbed himself with the killing needle, back in the asylum.

"Listen, I get it, Sam, okay? Not like I planned for it to be permanent or anything, but you're right it was reckless, and I'm sorry."

He sounds mostly sincere. No doubt as sincere as he can let himself be until they finish a few more steps of their intricate and long-practiced “get Dean to open up” dance.

It's Sam's turn now; to explain that Dean's half-assed apology isn't good enough. To be angry, but in an earnest, moderate way; to force Dean into saying something he wants to say anyway, give Dean permission to sidle up to the vortex of all the impossible, contradictory things he needs from Sam—that Sam be his own person but somehow also inseparable from Dean, be happy and safe but still hunt, be Dean's personal Jiminy Cricket but still ruthless when it's convenient, save Dean but let him go.

And mostly be alive. Always be alive. Even when Sam doesn't want to be, or Dean isn't.

Sam's tired of it, and anyway, now he has no choice. He steps off the dance floor of their past like the lights are all up and the bouncer's on his way.

"Yeah, I’m sorry too,” he says, “But sorry doesn't pay the bills, you know?"

Dean laughs uncomfortably. "What?"

"I said I’m sorry too, Dean. I’m not what I should’ve been. Neither of us are." Maybe he should try to seduce Dean. His solution, such as it is, requires sex, and honest conversation is sure not gonna get Dean into bed. But he hasn’t a clue how he’d go about it, and besides, he understands what he’s doing, what the shot he poured his already drunk brother means. Why pretend he’s something better than he is? "You should go lie down."

Dean's eyes narrow. "The fuck is that sposed to mean?" he asks. But his hand strays up to the bruises on his throat, where the tulpa held him while it told him all the things Sam never would have said.

Sam shrugs. "Means dad was right about me all along, I guess. I’m selfish, and I want what I want, and one of us should've put a bullet in me years ago, but we never managed it, and now it's too late."

"That's bullshit," Dean says, flat, a warning. “Fuck you, Sam."

Dean makes a scoffing noise, but then he touches his neck again, and his frown is a complicated one. Anger, Sam thinks, but also consideration. Maybe other things too. He throws back the rest of his whiskey in one swallow, and swaggers over to the bed on the left, the one that wasn't a chemical fire earlier in the evening. He ignores Sam like it was all his own idea. Turns down the covers, kicks off his shoes. He fumbles around in his duffle for his toiletries.

"Don't bother with that."

Dean drops the bag, and straightens up, back stiff. His glare is definitely appraising now. Challenging.

Sam's cheeks heat. He gets up from the table, and walks himself into Dean's space, and Dean just stands there, lets him do it. Sam gets too close to him, a sliver of air between their chests.

Dean's adam's apple bobs when he swallows.

It's not true what the tulpa claimed, that Sam wants to hurt him.

Not exactly.

Mostly he just wants to touch Dean, and there are only so many ways Dean will let himself be touched.

But he remembers too, the one time, after the panic room, his brother's throat between his hands. The hot rush of Dean's helplessness, how hard it'd been to stop.

He remembers how they'd spar as kids, dripping sweat out behind their muggy summer crap motels, when Dad had been gone too long, and they couldn't stand the world or each other a minute more. How much it'd be like the thunderstorm that breaks a heatwave; the rain and wind and even the hail, or the lightning when it got too close and the thunder when it rattled the windows, all of it nothing but a sweet relief.

"Outta my way, Sam," Dean says.

Dean moves to push past him, but he telegraphs it hard, leaves plenty of time for Sam to knock Dean’s hand’s off his chest, grab his biceps, solid and strong under Sam’s hands, hook a foot behind Dean’s ankle, and throw him.  
Dean lands diagonal across the bed, legs hanging off at the knee, and Sam follows him down, scrambles up onto the bed to sit on his hips. The choke hold that'd keep Dean down the easiest would also mean Sam's hand around his battered throat; same hold as the tulpa's. Same hand too, really, and Sam can't quite bear to do it.

He settles for Dean's wrists instead. Gets a good grip on the left one, forces it down beside Dean’s head, puts his body weight into it, pushing down into the mattress, pinning it solidly. The right hand, he can't get control of though, Dean too fast, even drunk and injured.

Dean bucks under him, one foot up on the bed for leverage, trying to tip Sam forward and make him give up the battle for Dean's hand and brace himself against the bed instead. His pelvis grinds against Sam's ass, and it's still about the fight—it really is; Dean will flip him if he can, will punch him if he gets a shot at it—but also...

...also, Dean is hard.

A flush travels up Sam's neck and heats his cheeks. His pulse pounds in his ears. Dean's lips are open, and he's flushed too, whether with exertion or arousal Sam can't say. His hair is spiky with sweat, and the bones of his wrists grind in Sam's grip, and his body under Sam's is graceful and deadly, and hard or not, he's fighting to win.

His hand slips past Sam's guard, and Sam's head snaps back, blossom of pain across his jaw, flood of copper in his mouth. Then a moment of vertigo, and their positions are reversed, Sam under Dean, Dean sitting on Sam's hips. Both Sam's hands are flat beside his head. Dean lets go of one wrist long enough to throw a couple more quick jabs at Sam's jaw for good measure, pins him to the mattress again before he has time to react.

"You 'bout done there, Sammy?" he asks. His eyes are hooded; his voice a rich, slow, drawl.

"Maybe." Sam rolls his hips under Dean. He's hard too, his dick a hot line against Dean's ass. He doesn't try to fight Dean off.

"I let you go, you gonna stay down?"

"Find out," Sam says, although the answer is yes.

Dean eases some weight off Sam's wrists, and when he doesn't move, lets them go completely.

"Shoulda put me in a choke hold when you had the chance. Can't win if you won't commit." He swipes a thumb across Sam's bloody lip.

Sam pulls his head off the bed just enough to draw Dean's thumb into his mouth, licks his own blood off it while he sucks it like it's oxygen and he'll die if Dean takes it away. He doesn't reply. He's always been a tactical fighter, and unless he fucks up pretty severely now, the fight's over, and Sam won.

He grinds against Dean's ass some more, leaves his hands palm up on the mattress.

Dean takes his thumb away and Sam whines. Dean bends over him, kisses him, and he opens his lips and lets Dean in. He lets Dean lick his palette, the back side of his teeth, the cut on the inside of his cheek he got from Dean's fist to his jaw. It stings and feels blistering hot, both at once. Dean's mouth tastes like whiskey, and Sam's tastes like metal and salt, and they kiss for a while, and it all goes right to Sam's cock.

Dean bites at Sam's neck just under where it meets his jaw, sucks a hickey onto his skin there. He pulls away to observe its progress enough times Sam's pretty sure he's gonna look like he got bit by a vampire come morning. But it’s more than fair, all things considered, and besides, it feels great going on; shivery and bright when Dean gets Sam's skin between his teeth, some deep primal place in Sam screaming danger and all the rest of him knowing it's pleasure instead, and then warm and wet and languid when Dean switches back to just his lips and suction.

When Dean's satisfied with his work, he scoots his weight off Sam's pelvis to his thighs instead, palms Sam's aching cock through his jeans, unzips him and gets him free. Dean makes a low, appreciative whistle. Takes Sam's cock in hand, and strokes it; up the shaft from base to head, back down again from head to base, slow and gentle.

...Slow as can fucking be, actually, and way too gentle to boot, and Dean's got that sly, delighted look on his face he gets when he's playing a practical joke. Sam rolls his hips, thrusts up into Dean's uncharacteristically delicate grip, but Dean just moves along with him so he gets neither more nor less than before.

"How's that, Sammy? You like? 'Cause I sure do love how you look with your cock in my hand. Bet I could do this all night long if you wanted."

Sam most definitely does not, but his protest comes out closer to another whine than to the growl he'd intended. Dean's grin gets even bigger, and okay, maybe it's not so bad after all. He's been wanting Dean for decades (centuries if you count the Cage), and he feels a little like he's drowning; too much warmth, sensation, (too much happiness he doesn't deserve, especially now), but still, for them to be together like this, even if it's just the once, and Dean to be so unreservedly happy about it—it’s all Sam ever could have asked for and more besides.

"None of that," Dean says, and rubs the melancholy out from between between Sam's eyebrows with his thumb.

He stops his world's slowest hand job completely—which wasn't the change in pacing Sam was hoping for—but he stretches like a cat, and pulls his shirt off over his head, all in one motion, and yeah, that's a pretty good distraction, even if it does show off the bruises the tulpa gave him (Sam gave him) on his ribs.

Sam’s pretty sure they’re still at the “let Dean direct the action” stage of the game. Dean went to all that trouble to get him on his back and all; Sam should at least stay put a while. But Dean’s expanse of muscle and smooth, freckled skin is too much to resist; cut pecs, lean along his ribs, and his belly just a little bit soft, because Dean loves life, even when sometimes he doesn’t too.

Fuck it, Sam gives up, and reaches for his brother. He thumbs at Dean's nipples until they pebble, leans up so he can lick one while he pinches the other until Dean is moaning and whining as much as Sam was before.  
Dean goes up on his knees and pulls his pants and boxer briefs down. Dean's cock springs free, flushed and heavy and glistening at the head. Sam's mouth waters and he swallows hard.

“Nuh-uh,” Dean says, and clambers out of Sam's reach.

He climbs off the bed, and skins his pants the rest of the way off, ambles over to his gas station goody bag, and pulls out one of those tiny bottles of lube they sell at mini-marts, the ones with dumb names like Ultimate Ride or Raspberry Flavored Love. And Sam is sucker-punched, because that means premeditation. It means Dean came home planning this too.

Okay, he’s drunk, sure.

But he was told that Sam wants him, and his answer was lube.

Sam wiggles out of his clothes. Watches Dean saunter back to him, cock hard and bobbing as he walks.

He straddles Sam again, and pops the cap on his tiny bottle. Gets Sam slicked up; generous, slippery pulls of Sam's dick, lube dripping off the side of his hand into Sam’s pubic hair and all over his balls. Sam’s heart is hammering. His cock twitches in Dean’s grip. He gets his hands on Dean's ass, squeezes his glutes, runs a finger down the cleft, but Dean bats his hand away and kneels up over Sam's cock and breaches himself. Rocks down, tight, tight. God, Dean. Dean, close and hot all around him. Dean, bottomed out, the juncture of his ass and thighs sitting snug on Sam’s pelvis. Dean’s thighs framing Sam’s hips. Dean’s hands braced behind him on Sam’s quads, adjusting his position, little rolls of his hips, clench of his muscles around Sam’s cock and then release.

Dean’s hooded eyes; his slow lazy smile.

Dean rides Sam hard, cowboy-style, one hand on Sam’s thigh and one on his chest. His abs and thighs bunch when he moves, and his cock slaps against Sam's belly and leaks so much precome it pools in Sam's navel. His skin is shiny with sweat and flushed with arousal from nipples to the points of his cheekbones and the tips of his ears.

Sam thrusts up into him, and enjoys the show. Holds him by the hips, savors the feel of Dean's ass flexing under his fingertips and tightening around his cock as he rides. Dean grunts at the end of Sam's strokes, where his up meets Dean's down with resounding slaps.

Dean closes his eyes, begins to chase his orgasm. Doesn't take either hand off Sam though to wrap around his dick and help himself out, so Sam does it for him, holds his brother in his hand, hard and perfect under slick velvet skin. Dean moans softly, and Sam jacks him as he moves. Dean chants _Sam, Sam, god, Sam._ And then he says _Sammy_ , just once, lower pitched, and Sam falls over the edge, orgasm ripping through him.

Dean follows almost immediately, clenches around Sam's cock before it’s even started to soften. He comes, thick and warm, over the top of Sam's hand, and all over Sam's chest.


	10. Chapter 10

It's deep, deep into the night; past the witching hour and into the dead hours before suburban households start to stir and businessmen's alarms wake them for the day.

Dean is snoring.

"Hey, Dean," Sam says. "Dean," and he jostles Dean a bit, to see what kind of reaction he'll get. When Dean only smacks his lips and makes vague " 'm sleeping" noises, Sam nudges him onto his back, and traces a quick spell for sleep on Dean's chest with his finger. It's basic work, and not very powerful, but Dean's drunk and fucked out too, so it should be enough.

Sam crawls out of bed, and gets started.

Dean's come is gloopy on Sam's chest. It's crusted in his chest hair and not nearly as sexy as it had been when freshly applied. He scrapes as much as he can off his body with his fingers, and wipes it on the inside of the brass bowl he keeps in his bag now for magic. His own come is on Dean's thighs, and he wipes some of that off and into the bowl too. Semen for love, and hopefully growth.

Sweat is tricky. Dean was dozing before he’d even climbed off Sam, but it took longer for him to fall asleep soundly. All Sam can really get from either of them by now is some minor dampness on his fingertips and maybe a few particles of salt; more the idea of sweat than its actual substance. It'll have to do. Sweat for labor.

Blood.

It doesn't escape him he'll be using mostly his own, because Dean's will be iffy to get in good quantities without waking. The unevenness is bad spellwork, and it sets his teeth on edge, but he needs something for a base, and his own blood is what he’s got. He draws Ruby's knife stinging down his forearm, fills the bowl half full.

Blood for sacrifice.

He adds herbs from his bag; just the basics, but they'll do. He stirs the mixture with his fingers. It's as simple as baking a (disgusting and sinister) cake. He salts around the bed, lights some white candles inside the circle at the cardinal directions, and some black candles between them. And then he has only the hard parts left.

"Dean, you awake?"

Dean is still sleeping the sleep of the drunk, bespelled, and well-fucked. Sam picks his arm up, slow and careful for reaction, lays Ruby's knife against the skin, and nicks him. Dean makes a little nng sound in the back of his throat, but doesn't wake. Sam holds Dean's arm over the bowl and drips Dean's blood in the mix. He crawls up onto the bed beside Dean to finger-paint.

He does himself first, and it doesn't feel like much. The concoction is slimy against his skin when he paints the sigils, the warm buzz of his power hard to hold onto when he's as full of misgivings as he is. The sigils on his left arm, thighs, and the soles of his feet aren't too technically difficult, but his chest he can't see all of, his right arm means painting with his left hand, the loop around his cock comes out uneven because his pubic hair gets in the way, and the one around his neck he can't see at all and has to just hope he's done more or less correctly. When he draws the final key on his belly, he feels nothing at all.

Then he does Dean.

What felt slimy and inert going on his own skin, on Dean feels slick, and sensual, and full of heat. Sam's blood-covered fingers slide in swirls and angles across Dean's chest, and Dean's eyes move behind his closed lids. A small, dreaming smile plays on Dean’s lips.

Sam's fingers glide down the trail of hair from Dean's belly to his groin, and Dean's cock twitches and starts to fill. He holds Dean's dick in his left hand while he paints around it with his right. Dean wiggles a little and sighs with content.

Sam feels it too, a peace. The modification to the spell he's casting depends on the connection between their souls—the one the angels bred into them and ruined so much of their lives with—and holding Dean here like this, touching him, watching his chest rise and fall, after all these years of the drive to be closer to Dean, to disappear inside him, of the competing need for escape that always fails, finally instead of it all being painful and far too much, something warm and soft and right settles inside him.

He paints patterns on Dean's feet, his arms, comes back up and paints over the bruising on his neck. He saves the web-like sigil he needs to do on Dean's abdomen, just under his ribs, for last.

He starts his chant, quiet, though he's sure by now that Dean won't wake. Draws the binding sigil over the place where an angel would enter Dean's body to touch his soul.

His fingers are still on Dean's skin when the blood red designs begin to glow. They darken and lighten at once, change hue, glow with the purple of magic and power; first softly, then fiercely, then with a light so brilliant it hurts to observe. Sam turns his eyes away, but he can't escape it. The light is on him, and in him, burning loops of magic that leap from the sigils on his skin to Dean's and back again. They scream in Sam's ears, whip like a gale around Sam and his brother. The candles blow out. The salt scatters and the circle breaks.

And then it's quiet, and Dean is still asleep, as if none of it had happened outside Sam's imagination. The sigils on his skin glow a rich, gentle lavender. Sam is exhausted and shaky, power gone out of him like an adrenaline crash. He can barely keep his eyes open long enough to lay down beside Dean and rest his hand on the sigil on Dean’s belly, before he falls asleep too.

 

-*-*-

Sam wakes to the feel of Dean's hand in his hair, petting through the strands. He cracks open his eyes and Dean is sitting with his back against the headboard, watching Sam. Dean's eyes are hooded and his expression is carefully neutral. Sam is curled partway up on his side though, with a hand on Dean's thigh and a knee against Dean's calf, and Dean hasn't pushed him away.

"Wanna tell me what this crap all over me is?" Dean asks.

The sigils on Dean's body are back to their original color, crusted and smeared, only a few still readable. Dried blood and mixed herbs flake off his skin, and the sheets are dirty with rust red stains.

Sam rolls reluctantly onto his back and pushes up to sitting too, settles next to Dean, his leg lightly touching Dean's along the side. He wishes he still had his hand on Dean too, but it won't be that kind of conversation.

"It's a spell."

"Yeah, I guessed that, Sabrina. What did you do to me?"

Sam pulls the ugly red bedspread up to his waist. He should've put pajama pants and a T-shirt on before he fell asleep. He's cold, and Sam's afraid of the cold now, afraid he'll never again be able to tell whether the AC's just too high or he's about to kill someone. His jaw is tender where Dean connected during their fight, and he's got butterflies in his stomach, waiting for Dean's anger, and wondering why it hasn't come yet. It makes him feel twelve years old again, caught out in bad behavior and hoping Dean is feeling indulgent and willing to let whatever stupid thing Sam did this time slide.

It isn't a sliding kind of offense.

"To us," Sam says. He points to his own naked chest, covered in ruined sigils too. "I cast it on us both."

Sam clears his throat. Notices he's fidgeting with the bedspread and makes himself stop. No point putting it off. "It's a death transfer spell."

Dean's eyes narrow, but he doesn't pull away.

"Remember that magician who could transfer his death to someone else with a playing card? It's like that. Only, uh, more of a binding. I cast it to form a recursive loop, transferring the death back and forth until it reaches equilibrium with both of us either alive or dead.”

The glow of the spell is gone, but now that he’s held the bond between their souls in his hand, Sam can still feel it humming beneath his skin. For the amount of power in the spell, it was ridiculously effortless to cast. _Arrange it so you do what the world wants anyway._ Heaven bred people like dogs for generations to bind Sam and Dean's souls together. Now the knot is just a little tighter than they planned.

Dean itches at the spell's remains. There's blood under his fingernails. Under Sam's too, from when he cast it.

"Why would you do that, Sam?"

The spell won't fix Sam's emotional issues. It won't help him with his anger, or with the power of the tulpa, which was always Sam's, and is still living and dangerous inside him. But he can't lose Dean again. It's as simple as that.

"I'm saving your life," he says.

"I wasn't dying."

Sam stares up at the ceiling. His eyes sting, and he is absolutely not going to cry.

"Sam, it wasn't on purpose, I swear. The antidote was supposed to work."

There's nothing left to say. Now it won't happen again.

"You should've asked."

"Maybe." Dean would never have agreed.

"Is there a counter-spell? Some way to reverse it?"

"Not as far as I know."

"Wow, Sam. That's..." Dean rubs a hand through his hair.

He draws away from Sam then finally, swings his feet over the edge of the bed. The side of Sam's leg feels suddenly cold, goosebumps marching up the skin that was touching Dean's and spreading like a conquering army.  
Dean stands by the bed, stark naked and achingly beautiful. He frowns down on Sam, and his expression shutters, and Sam can see him put routine on like body armor, pile their lifetime of ignoring horrors around him like sandbags.

"Checkout's in twenty," he says, "Your evil witchy thing smells like ass."

He disappears into the bathroom.

The toilet flushes. The shower comes on. Sam sits in the half-empty bed with his loneliness and guilt, and his fear that Dean will leave him.

It won't happen. Realistically, he knows that. Neither of them has ever managed to leave for long, except through death, and now Sam's taken that escape away. The fear is enormous anyway though, and Sam wants to hide behind his routine too, but he's covered in the exact same nasty crap Dean is, and Dean's in the bathroom where all the 'start your day fresh' stuff is.

He gives a perfunctory knock on the bathroom door and when Dean doesn't answer, goes in. Steam billows out from the shower. Sam pisses and washes his hands and wipes the condensation off the mirror. The pounding white noise of the shower muffles Dean's silence while Sam cleans up at the sink. He goes through two threadbare washcloths, stains them too red to use, and still feels disgusting afterwards. He could make an overture, break the silence, except he has no idea what to say.

He goes back out to the main room without he and Dean having spoken. He gets dressed. He packs up his weapons and magic supplies, and when Dean still isn't out of the shower by the time he's finished, picks Dean's bloodstained clothes from yesterday off the carpet and shoves them to the bottom of Dean's duffle, with all the rest of his dirty laundry. He fires up his laptop. They've missed checkout. He's hungry.

He surfs for new cases for a while but it's hard to concentrate. Outside, car doors slam and housekeeping carts clatter past their window. Sam calls the front desk and tells them to put another night on the card.  
He gives up and yells through the bathroom door. "You alright in there, Dean? Bathtub monster suck you down the drain?"

The shower shuts off. "Jeez, Sam, yes, I'm fine, okay? Ease up on the leash a little."

Dean walks out a minute later, towel drying his hair, skin flushed pink from the shower everywhere it isn't bruised. He’s got a second towel around his waist, but it doesn’t cover much, and what it does cover, Sam should absolutely not be thinking about right now.

_Ease up on the leash._

Sam clears his throat uncomfortably. "It's uh, it's not like that. You shouldn’t even feel it unless one of us is dying."

Dean glares at him. Throws the towel on the floor and rummages through his duffle. Pulls out a pair of jeans and sniffs the crotch.

"Oh, I'll feel it alright," he says grimly. "Every time we go on a hunt, from now until the two of us bite it."

He tosses shirts into random piles on the bed, undoing Sam's packing while he looks for whatever he's looking for. "Which not for nuthin', Sam, is probly gonna be a whole lot sooner now than it would've been. I'll be second-guessing myself 24/7, and that's no way to hunt. Awesome way to get killed though."

"So, what, Dean? You expect me to believe you can't hunt without doing something idiotic every ten minutes?" Sam's voice starts to rise, gearing up for a fight without his permission. If there's a single thing in the universe he doesn't have a right to be angry about, it's this.

And yet here he is.

Dean pulls a T-shirt over his head. It looks exactly like the three others he threw on the bed.

"How come you never told me you wanted to bang?" he asks.

"I. What?"

"Bang,” Dean says, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “You know, horizontal hokey pokey? Take old One Eye to the optometrist? You must’ve guessed I might be up for it, so how come you never asked?"

"Dean, no offense, but what the hell are you talking about?"

"And the Cage? You and Lucifer?"

"That's—it's none of your business, Dean."

"Sure," Dean acknowledges easily. He sits at the edge of the bed and pulls a pair of boxer briefs on. "Shit like that's hard to talk about. Remember when I first got back from Hell, and you had to drag it out of me kicking and screaming?

“Turns out it was good for me though. So last night, while I was busy feeling sorry for myself and getting hammered, I started thinking, who drags all the bad stuff out of you, Sam? Rowena? 'Cause it should be me, right? And obviously it hasn't been."

"Dean—"

“No. Here’s the thing, Sam. None of this,"—Dean gestures around at the wreckage of the room—"was okay. It was shitty, and it’s gonna fuck things up even worse than you probably guessed. But you did try to tell me. Must’ve told me two hundred times after I made that first demon deal, which, not gonna lie, I would still do today in a heartbeat.

"And you tried to tell me after Gadreel too, and I shut you down so hard you haven’t told me a goddamn thing since."

Dean pulls on the jeans he grabbed from the duffle. They’re not the dirty ones from last night, but they’re old and have a blood stain on one knee that won’t come out. Sam’s still sitting at the table with his laptop in front of him, browser open to an article about chupacabra sightings in Arizona. The accompanying photo looks like a mangy dog.

"And all this time,” Dean says, “—all this time, Sam; almost four freakin’ years—I've been thinking _oh everything's super hunky dory here between Sam and me,_ and you've been thinking I'd let Lucifer— Jesus," Dean rubs his hand over his face, and lets out a long shaky breath. "Lucifer.”

"It wasn't like that, Dean," Sam says gently, "Not like I woke up every morning thinking _maybe today my brother will sell me to the devil_."

"Whatever. That's not the point.”

Sam’s a little bit lost, tangled up in the intensity of Dean’s honesty, unsure what to do with it, or where it’s all going.

"Point is, Sam; guess who was right?"

Ah. Okay then.

"I was," Sam acknowledges.

"Yeah. Yeah, I think maybe you were."


	11. Chapter 11

They leave for home after that. It's a quiet drive, and Dean keeps the stereo turned down low, and Sam falls asleep outside Atwood with his face scrunched up against the side window. He wakes to Dean smiling into his phone. Cas is alive. There are hugs all around, and shortly thereafter is a hunt—a shapeshifter who thinks he's Chuck's gift to the wild, wild west—and it all goes wrong, because when do hunts not?

"Dean will be fine," Cas reassures Sam. They're waiting up late in the library, coffee cups in hand, and customary piles of research on the table. Dean texted. Something about tunnels and take care of Jack until Dean gets back, and it was cryptic enough Sam knows Dean’s out there doing something dangerous and probably stupid.

But he finds he doesn't mind so much. He closes his eyes, isolates the quiet pull of the bond on their souls, brings it forward, and weaves it around his heart like a blanket.

Tomorrow he’ll call Rowena, and tell her what happened at the hotel. He made mistakes—bad ones—and he hurt Dean badly, and there’s a sick coil of guilt in his belly when he thinks of it, a shiver of goosebumps down his spine. But the tulpa's gone at least, and Sam's not feeling any irresistible urges to burn anything down.

The hour gets late, and Cas and Jack head off to bed, while Sam does his witchcraft training. He's practicing a chant for channeling his power; his back is earnestly straight, eyes unfocused on the candle flame in front of him, when he hears the bunker door slam and Dean’s footsteps on the stairs.

“ _Abvya pajjo homi, anigho homi_ —Hey, Dean. Case go okay? _—Sukhi attanam pariharami._ ”

“Almost got to test that curse of yours out against a gunshot wound to the head, so that part could've been better." Dean drops his jacket on one of the library chair backs. He disappears into the kitchen and returns with two beers. "But the shapeshifter's dead, and we're not; so score one for the home team.”

He plops one bottle down on the table beside Sam, takes a long pull from the other. Sam's lost his place in the chant, but it's only practice anyway. Dean stands at the table end, and watches quietly as Sam starts over from the beginning.

Dean's close there, where he's standing. Close enough Sam's cheeks heat when he forgets a line in the spotlight of Dean’s attention. Close enough the reflection of the candle breaks into points of flame against the green of Dean's eyes.

He's outrageously calm for someone who was recently nearly shot to death, but that's Dean, and not unexpected. The risk to Sam though—that, Sam was expecting a different reaction to.

"I dunno," Dean says, "I thought about it in the car some more. We've fucked up plenty of worse shit and come out okay."

He cracks his back and stretches. When he's done with his beer, he claps Sam on the back, and heads for bed.

Sam finishes up, blows out his candle, and follows suit.

In the hall outside their rooms, he hears Dean’s voice through his door. “—last time, but your dead mom shtick worked good on Jack. And uh, me and Sam’ve got a... job challenge, I guess you'd call it, that I could use some help with. So yeah, call me back.”

Sam knocks. Stands on the threshold.

“Were you seriously just on the phone with a psychologist?” he asks.

Dean rolls his eyes, but he doesn't seem particularly upset. “Mia Vallens, yeah. Well, her voice mail anyway. Figured we could work your stupid curse like a case. You're doing the 'don't be a psychotic, super-powered killer' aspect, so I thought I'd handle the 'grow up and stop making your brother crazy' part."

"Huh," Sam says.

Dean is sitting up in bed, reclined against the headboard. He's stripped down to his T-shirt and boxer briefs; black cotton against fair, freckled skin. His hair is in soft little porcupine spikes and he’s got a smudge of grave dirt on one cheek.

"And if you make any therapy jokes, so help me, Sam, I’ll switch your shampoo bottle with Nair, so don’t even start.”

Sam snorts. "I wouldn't dare."

"Did you want something, dude, or were you just stopping by to chat about the therapeutic process?"

Sam's heart decides to run a road race in his chest.

"I uh," he says articulately. No time like the present. "Actually, I wondered if you wanted to bang."

Dean raises an eyebrow, but there's a hint of smile at the corner of his mouth so Sam figures he's doing okay so far.

"I've got your optometry exam right here in my pants," Sam says, like an absolute fool. And then: "...How was that? Romantic enough, or should I brag about my hokey pokey skills too?"

Dean cracks up laughing. His smile is dazzling, like staring into a star.

"Nah, dude," Dean says. The bulge in his boxer briefs looks a little more prominent than moments ago. “You’re not the bragging type. Come on in and show me instead."

Outside, the world is a mess. The ice caps are melting, and thousands of gallons of oil are leaking from the Keystone pipeline, and there's a mass shooter at large in Texas, and their mom is trapped in some post-Apocalyptic wasteland with the real Lucifer and no way out.

Inside it’s a mess too.

But it’s less of a mess than yesterday, maybe less than it’s been in years.

The part of the world that is Sam knows which direction it wants to move in. Sam lets its gravity pull him over the threshold and into Dean’s room. Lets it crush him against Dean's lips.

Lets it break him to pieces in Dean's arms.

**Author's Note:**

> Well, that fic sure was an express train directly to my id. Thanks to everyone who made it all the way here to the end! I hope you enjoyed it. I feel sadly like it's pretty unpolished, and would be really awesome if I only had another year or so to work on it. I learned a lot writing it though, and am happy to see it released into the wild. 
> 
> I know nothing about irl tulpamancy except what I read on the internet to write this fic, so please don't take anything in here as a serious representation of Western magical practice. I basically, in the fine tradition of SPN, made it all up wholesale as a metaphor for something else. 
> 
> The stanzas I claimed were from a chant to channel Sam's power are real though. They're for mettā bhāvanā, the cultivation of loving-kindness and good will, a practice that is A+ for stress reduction, as well as just becoming a more decent human being. I recommend it highly to anyone. [Here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ddivfb7Ojhg) is a gorgeous (if slightly floofy) rendition of mettā chanting sung by Imee Ooi, with translation and transliterated pronunciation, if anyone wants to try it out. I gave Sam lyrics from the beginning portion, because the bedrock cornerstone of compassion is compassion towards one's self, something that Sam isn't always terribly good at.
> 
> I treasure kudos and comments, so hit me up if you want. I do get overwhelmed, so my replies can be slow in coming at times. But even when it takes me longer than it should to write back, I read all my comments right away and they make me feel loved and keep me encouraged.


End file.
